Awakening

While the red shoulder hawks went about their courtship and nest building activities, a roseate spoonbill soared overhead on a cool January morning. I was in the hydric flatwoods in SW Florida, a moist area filled with tall pines and carpeted with saw palmettos that appeared to have just been trimmed. I was getting a glimpse into the timeline of this ecosystem’s life and into our own awakening as responsible citizen scientists.

It was now January and a fire had occurred here in August. Just before the fire, understory plants such as salt bush, wax myrtle, grape vines and blackberries were beginning to compete with the saw palmettos and dead leaves were thickening the floor. Grasses and wildflowers were being shaded out. The fire that had burned here six months before was called a prescribed burn set by the land managers from the South Florida Water Management District, the primary landowner and one of the partners participating in the Corkscrew Regional Eco-system Watershed or CREW. CREW is the largest intact watershed in SW Florida encompassing 60,000 acres, which contains a 5,000 acre sawgrass marsh, headwaters for the entire watershed, including the Audubon Society’s Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. The CREW Land &Water Trust is the private, non-profit partner that helps to coordinate land acquisition, management and public education and outreach.

The people of CREW have formed a working relationship with the land, so much so, that a paradigm shift is developing. They are beginning to call themselves stewards, a term that more accurately defines their role as caretakers in relationship with the land through conservation and sustainable practices. My appreciation for the work that all members of the Trust do is immense, including their efforts to share their knowledge and recruit more citizen scientists.

We are a part of this landscape; not apart from it.  As citizen scientists, we can focus our interaction through observation and hands on learning. Through the CREW Trust’s education programs, citizens are being called to participate in these fires so that they too can witness the transformative properties of fire and learn how to conserve and sustain the Florida landscape. On this day I was reminded that this ecosystem evolved with fire and that we need to live with fire if we are to maintain healthy plant and animal life.  Fire has always been a part of this environment, having transformative powers on the local landscape. Burning allows the carbon and other nutrients bound up in the over growth and leaf litter to be released back into the soil, controls insect pests and diseases, and improves the quality and quantity of forage plants. Within this stand of pine forest, the hope was that the burn would allow grasslands to remain open at the edge of older pines perhaps creating suitable habitat for the rare Red-cockaded Woodpecker.

Setting a burn every one - two years would also create a habitat favorable for ground foraging birds, while a three - five year burn will encourage understory plants suitable for turkey and deer. In another area the decision to allow the pines to develop into a hardwood hammock was evidenced by the emerging smaller oaks and the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker sampling them all. This succession into a hardwood hammock will bring another diversity of species, contributing to the variety of habitats that evolved with this land.

I saw that this activity is both a science and an art form. Land stewardship involves reading the land and making decisions about the succession timeline. The variables for determining when and where a fire needs to be set are many. They consider the time of year, every detail about the weather, plants and animals, as well as educating partners in the burn, which can be many volunteers. Safety is always on their minds. Wait too long for a prescribed burn and the resulting wildfire could be catastrophic, burning so hot as to wipe out the forest entirely and threaten homes. The demonstration burn this day was a small one set against the oncoming wind referred to as a back burn. This patch of palmettos and cabbage palms had been overrun by the understory plants and leaf litter. Within just a few minutes after setting the fire the brush was gone and green still remained on the tips of the palms. With the passage of time, I will report on the wonders that I find there.

True Colors

Pausing to take in the magnificence of the wet grass prairie, hoping for a glimpse of a deer, and hearing the cry of a bald eagle, I was eventually pulled in to witness the red shoulder hawk making a kill. I turned toward the stand of pond cypress and focused my gaze. I heard a scuffle and time seemed to slow down, as I sensed the stand of shedding cypress holding this hawk, struggling to gain his footing on a branch. Then, slowly and deliberately he peeled back from his talon full of leaves, his prize of a katydid. He ate it slowly and I wondered if the bird was actually tasting his morsel or being careful not to drop it. After the meal the bird flew to a nearby perch to bathe in the sun and look out with me and my companion over the wet prairie. As other visitors came and went along the boardwalk, they were oblivious to his presence just a few feet away from their footsteps.

This is what I love about being at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary here in Collier County, Florida; an opportunity to experience the daily life within this wetland wonder and use it as my own nourishment for my heart and mind. The three of us continued our meditation of sorts until my human companion and I felt the pull to enter the forest and travel down toward the bald cypress further into the swamp. Finding more moments like the one I had just had was tempting and irresistible. 

Journey

We have a bloom of red tide occurring now spreading from Sannibel down to the keys.When the wind is blowing onshore the red tide can be particularly irritating. The plant like organism is a phytoplankton called Karina brevis and produces a toxin that affects the central nervous system of fish, birds, mammals and other animals. It kills by paralyzing. For myself, my throat and eyes become irritated and I find it hard to breathe without coughing.

According to a report from PEER, red tides have grown 15 fold from the 1950's in the coastal waters of SW Florida. They go on to say that of the world wide species of algae that produce harmful blooms 70 out of 100 are indigenous to Florida; 50 marine/estuarine species and 20 freshwater. The blooms have been made worse by the excess amounts of nitrates and phosphates running off from our landscapes. Personally, I prefer the sea grass and the other organisms that thrive in our marine ecosystems without the added fertilizers.

New Beginnings

May the new year bathe us in light to illuminate our true being!

Termite Surprise

One by one they left the branches and surrounded me. The fact that I was there was incidental. Termites were swarming and the blue-gray gnatcatchers were gobbling them up. The click, click, click sounds of snapping beaks surrounded me as I realized that a small mixed flock, pine warblers among them had joined in. I stood still and just witnessed the birds hovering and snapping around and through the swarm. If I wanted to and my reflexes were fast enough I’m sure I could of nabbed a bird or two. But I just wanted to soak it up. At first the insects were hard to see but the filtered light coming down through the branches highlighted the tiny wings and made it easy for me to catch. For the termites that thought they had escaped the beaks of those small birds destiny called. They were soon gobbled up by the army of swallows just above, another resource partitioning event right before my eyes.

How did I luck out to witness such a food fest? These small song birds normally glean their prey off branches and buds, keeping themselves camouflaged from larger predators. The swarm was coming from the saw palmettos that were under scrub oaks edged by wax myrtle, rusty lyonia and beauty berry shrubs. They left the comfort of the leaf cover to grab their prey and then fly back to their perch. I was walking on a path that ran right through the saw palmettos so, essentially, I was in the right place at the right time. I walk that path often, so the birds may have been used to my presence. Or, they may just have been hungry enough to navigate around me. I think this is a key to any good nature observation. Know your local seasons and the ebb and flow of the food web. I pay attention to the larvae in the shrubs and trees as well as the mosquitoes and deer flies that emerge when it gets a little drier and hotter. But I had forgotten about the termites…bonus!

Cuckoo for Webworms

Listening to the delicate shower of detritus as I walked around the boardwalk at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, I felt the crunch of cypress needles underfoot as they fell to the floor boards, along with a substance that looked like brown sugar. As I travelled deeper into the bald cypress forest, the powdery substance became more noticeable and my attention was drawn up to a scattered flock of birds eating something in the canopy. My camera revealed the yellow billed cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus, picking off small white furry caterpillars from the limbs. At first I just saw one but then more arrived until I was made aware that a feasting was going on all around me; caterpillars eating cypress and cuckoos eating caterpillars. Every year around this time the trees are fed upon by caterpillars known as webworms that will eventually morph into moths starting the whole process over again. They form webs in the trees around the leaves and eat until they are ready to pupate. This is also the time of year that the migrating warblers start arriving. The warblers must have been in a different part of the sanctuary taking part in a feast of their own because the cuckoos had the caterpillar food market cornered. Normally, the white “hair” on the caterpillar acts as a deterrent to predators but the cuckoo snatched them up. Normally a solitary bird, they were arriving one after another. Not only an interesting sight but the cypress fragrance together with the scent of bayberry from the wax myrtle mixed with our cool dry air was reminiscent of winter holidays. What a contrast to the muggy hot days of summer! This weather and this view is a wonderful gift that I will feast on for the remainder of the season.

It's Complicated

With the waxing of the moon has come some glorious weather here in SW Florida and some spectacular migrating butterflies. This one is called cloudless sulphur, Phoebis sennae, traveling down from the north in search of warmth and food. Senna ligustrina, this butterfly’s host plant has emerged from the seed bank and thrived in the garden. This plant is still blooming and there are plenty of nectar plants around to nourish the adult butterfly. This summer the plant was covered with these caterpillars, eating both the leaves and flowers. As they ate the flowers their color turned from green to yellow and vice versa when they ate the leaves.

But I’ve noticed something else in my quest for connections. I am fascinated by extra floral nectaries, EFN, and this plant has them at the base of each leaf stem. To me it resembles a modified stipule. Nectaries are usually associated with the flower, secreting a sweet liquid to insure pollination. But these appendages also secrete sugars with other nutritional compounds and have nothing to do with pollination but they help to preserve the flowers. The tip of the gland is yellow or orange while the base that attaches to the stem is green. Ants are travelling and congregating around them. I have read that the ants will attack the larvae but I haven’t seen this onslaught yet. Interestingly, when the eggs are laid they look white and pitcher shaped. As they mature they turn yellow like these nectaries. I haven’t seen any eggs since August.

The ants were absent when the caterpillars were eating the flowers this summer but they are abundant now. Do the nectar producing glands respond to stress in the plant producing more nectar, attracting more ants? Now, I am seeing the flowers fertilized and seed pods forming. If ants are preventing the butterflies from flourishing on this bush are they laying them on a cassia instead, an alternative host plant without EFN? Or will they forego breeding here and return north in the spring? Obviously, I need to examine this relationship between host plant and butterfly more closely.