Rainy Days!

North Yuba River

This week we got three days of rainy weather!  It really poured a few times, and we got a little more than 1/2" of rain in total!  It smells wonderful outside! 

Up in the Lakes Basin this week, we watched

bubbles form when raindrops landed on the surface of Summit Lake (below)!  The bubbles only lasted for a few seconds, but it was amazing to watch!  When a raindrop impacts a solid surface, a very thin film of air is entrapped under the drop and transforms into a bubble! It was beautiful to see!

Summit Lake 

(It's really more a pond than a lake!)

     Sulfur Shelf - Laetiporus conifericola      Giant Sawtooth - Neolentinus ponderosus

Fungi Season!

Cool, rainy, Fall days are when fungi start to show up!  Right now I've only seen fungi on the trunks of a few trees, and none on the forest floor yet.  Fungi, or mushrooms, are the "flower" or "fruiting body" of the fungi.  Instead of seeds, the fungi produce spores.  Fungi found on the trunk of a tree usually indicates that the tree isn't healthy.  Fungal spores are born on the wind, or a carried inside a tree on the feet of wood-boring insects. Once inside a tree, fungi begins to break down the wood.  

unknown fungi on oak trunk                          Wolf Lichen - Letharia vulpina

Although they are both found on trees, the fungi (left) and lichen (right) have totally different relationships with their host plants.  Most fungi, but not all, can be destructive to their host plants. Lichen, however, doesn't affect its host plant at all.  When found above ground in a living tree, most fungi can cause the tree's death and decay.  Whereas lichen found in trees, grows on the outside surface of the bark and doesn't tap into any of the trees nutrients.  Lichen produces its own food, with the help of a photosynthetic green algae that lives inside it!  In the cool damp days of Fall, lichen can become soft and pliable.  In the summer, lichens become brittle, dry and dormant!  In contrast, mushrooms will decay over the winter and be absent in Summer.

Lesser Goldfinches  - Carduelis psaltria    Pine Siskin - Carduelis pinus

Spotted Towhee (out-of focus in the background) - Pipilo maculatus

Garden Update!

On Wednesday, when the rain stopped around 5:00 pm, the seed eaters were back in our garden big time!  More Lesser Goldfinches, Pine Siskins, and Spotted Towhees showed up in our garden during that time, than I'd seen all week!  They spent several hours busily gleaning seeds from the Sunflower heads!  It was delightful to watch them and to listen them chattering away!

Anna's Hummingbird (male) - Calypte anna

Hummers

Only two hummers are in our garden these days!  Since the flowers are past their prime, we recently put up a hummingbird feeder in our garden.  Now the hummer (above) is ceaselessly defending the feeder!  I started thinking that maybe we shouldn't have put it up, because it might make the the hummer stay on too long and not migrate!  I looked it up on the Cornell website www.allaboutbirds.org, and here's what they had to say!  

"Keeping your feeders up has no influence on whether a bird will start its journey south. A number of factors trigger the urge for birds to migrate, and the most significant one is day length. As days grow shorter in late summer, birds get restless and start to head south, taking advantage of abundant natural food, and feeders where available, to fuel their flight.  Hummingbirds are no different from others and will migrate regardless of whether feeders are kept up. However, we encourage people to keep feeders up for several weeks after the last hummingbird leaves the area, just in case a straggler shows up in need of additional energy before completing the long journey south."

So I'll keep it up for a while longer!  Yahoo!  I love watching the hummers!

Steller's Jays - Cyanocitta stelleri

Steller's Jays

Steller's Jays are year-round residents in our neighborhood.  Right now they are busy eating the sunflower seeds in our garden.  Lately we've seen and heard them imitating the call of the Lesser Goldfinches!  They are opportunistic feeders and will eat seeds, fruit, insects, small mammals, and even carrion!  Their beautiful blue feathers are not blue because of pigment.  The color comes from the structure of the cells in the feathers that cancel out the red and yellow wavelengths, but reflect the blue wavelengths of light!  Here's a quote from an article written by the Park Ranger/Resources Management & Science Liaison of Yosemite National Park!

"Feathers are made of keratin, the same stuff your fingernails are made of.  As a feather that will become blue grows, keratin molecules grow inside each cell, creating a pattern. When the cell dies, a structure of keratin interspersed with air pockets remains. As sunlight strikes one of these feathers, the keratin pattern causes red and yellow wavelengths to cancel each other out. The blue wavelengths reflect back, giving the feather its color. Different shapes and sizes of air pockets and keratin make different shades of blue. This is what scientists call a structural color (as opposed to pigmented color.)"

You can easily see the effect of this structural coloration when watching a Steller's Jay move from sunlight into shadow!  Check it out!

White-Crowned Sparrow (immature-left & adult-right) - Zonotrichia leucophrys 

New Visitors!

These two birds are the same species!  The one on the left is in its first year.  The one on the right is an older adult.  They look so different!  These birds spent the summer at higher elevations in the Sierra, and are now migrating through our neighborhood.  They will spend the winter down in the foothills and Central Valley of California.  Their pinkish-orange bills are distinctive, and made them easy to identify!

We're so lucky that we have field guides that are the result of years and years of scientific research and study!  The internet is also an amazing source of information, that's right at our fingertips for free!  We are so spoiled!  If you would like to contribute to data that is used for the study of birds, consider joining the Cornell Lab - Project FeederWatch (www.feederwatch.org) that begins this coming November 11th!  Here's the info from their website!  

"Project FeederWatch is a winter-long survey of birds that visit feeders at backyards, nature centers, community areas, and other locales in North America. FeederWatchers periodically count the birds they see at their feeders from November through early April and send their counts to Project FeederWatch.  FeederWatch data help scientists track broadscale movements of winter bird populations and long-term trends in bird distribution and abundance."

  Think about joining Project FeederWatch.  I have!  I'll keep you posted on my FeederWatch observations this winter!

Deer (females) - Odocoileus hemionus sp.

Mule Deer species?

I finally got a deer photograph!  These three females were just off the main road, early one morning!  The more I look at them, the more questions I have!  Supposedly the main deer in our area are Columbian Black-tailed Deer.  Could there also be Mule Deer?  Are the two adults separate species?  They look different!  If I had gotten a photo of their tails, it would be simple to determine the species, but I didn't!  Black-tailed Deer have black tails.  Mule Deer have white tails with black tips.  

Is one older than the other?  Look how the adult on the left  has much smaller ears!  Does ear size vary within one species?  What could have caused the big scar on the middle top side of the left one?  Sheesh!  I'll post my photo on www.inaturalist.org and see what responses I get back!  

If you guessed that the bird in last weeks' photo was a Black Phoebe, you're right! I'll talk more about them next week!

If you guessed that the mammal tail in the last weeks' photo belonged to a Chickaree/Douglas Squirrel, you're right!

The year-round resident birds will be featured next week.  Can  you guess what species they might be?

I haven't found any fish fry or fingerlings in the river lately.  Either they've matured and moved to deeper water, or they've been eaten! I'll check again this week!

Whose track is this?

Will more mushrooms pop up?

Check back for the answers to these questions and more!

Your comments & questions are greatly appreciated! 

Please email me at northyubanaturalist@gmail.com! 

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