Category: ecology

Red-Spotted Purple

Posted on by Jess

This little corner of my yard may not look like much, but maybe that’s kind of the point for now. This year, I’ve finally moved onto this part of home ownership I’m most excited about: creating backyard habitat. Over the last few weeks, I had help from my neighbors (tree trimmers) to transplant some young sweet gum trees that got a little too big for me to handle. Unfortunately, despite watering daily, they are in transplant shock and most of the leaves have died. There are plenty more where they came from, given the neighbors’ yards have big trees, so I’ll try not to be too attached to an outcome if they don’t make it. I always knew it was a bit of an experiment trying to transplant trees this month anyway, and those needed to come away from the house; I just wanted to give them a shot at growing instead of removing them. I didn’t notice another bigger young sweet gum (a testament to the overgrowth next to my house) that I might have asked them to take a shot at moving for me had I seen it in time. Instead, I tried to dig it up myself, and seeing how the transplant experiment has gone so far, I didn’t feel confident trying to plant it.

That and 2 other small saplings have been sadly added to the brush pile…but again, I still have plenty of other tiny trees to find a home for. Speaking of “brush pile” I moved some old wood left by the previous homeowner and unsurprisingly found lots of ants. I assume they’re carpenter ants from the tunnels left in the damp wood, but I’d have to brush up on my ant ID skills to be sure, I guess.

So far, it looks like 2 other small sweet gums I moved have been doing well, as have the 2 little red maples and a black cherry. Pictured below, though, is a black cherry sapling springing up at the base of a grove of sweet gums. I was most excited today to watch a red-spotted admiral flitting around the young tree laying eggs.

I stood very still, and eventually, she landed on a leaf right under my nose! She was so close to my face I could hear her moving on the leaf. I watched her lay an egg, and when she flew off, there was a tiny glistening freshly laid egg at the leaf tip. I can’t wait to look for caterpillars in the coming week!

Bonus: today was also the first day I saw a hummingbird use the little feeder I setup!

Kubota Garden

Posted on by Jess

As we walked some of the trails we heard the harsh calls of Steller’s Jays and got our best looks yet of the trip! Then, as we were leaving we saw what we’re identifying from its display as a rufous hummingbird; it was not a lifer for either of us but cool to see again out west. It did a giant loop in flight and would pause at the top. Eventually, it was chased off by another hummingbird.

At Luther Burbank Park we saw our lifer bushtits.

At Lake Sammamish State Park, I saw my lifer mink!

Breeding Dispersal, Migratory Nomadism

Posted on by Jess

Though the following terms aren’t all the same, they describe whether or not breeding birds occupy the same territories as they did in the previous year.

  • breeding dispersal – this is a commonly used term, especially in ornithology
  • migratory nomadism – comes up in grassland bird literature
  • fidelity – more broadly used in ecology
    • site
    • territory
  • return rate – a phrase used with other meanings in other disciplines, but also used in ecology
  • philopatry – can add “breeding” before it to specify

So, in my case, to find as much information as I can whether grassland birds return to the same place or not in subsequent years (and why/when/what modulates it), I’d need to search through all these terms. The 1st 2 are my favorites because of their prevalence within my sub-disciplines, and are what I’d use in my own papers to increase the chances my target audience will find my paper in a search.

My to-date only 1st authored paper starts to explore this phenomenon, and it’s a running theme throughout my dissertation. What do we know about breeding dispersal, and how do we know? One of the most common and rigorous methods is to look at return rates of banded, marked or otherwise identifiable individuals.

  • return/recovery of a banded individual: ideal! We know exactly “who” that individual is, where we caught it, how old it is/was, gender, etc.
  • failure of a banded individual to return: we don’t know what happened to it. It could have died or gone elsewhere

We can map territories, but without being able to identify who’s holding it, we don’t necessarily know when a territory is taken over nor by whom. I read an interesting paper (Siegel et al. 2015) that used age classes to determine whether dispersal of juvenile or adult birds was the predominant vector of colonization for a disturbance-dependent species. At a coarser scale, we can look at how occupancy of areas changes year-to-year; in other words, we can see if as many individuals of a species return to an area as the previous year. Scaling up that concept, we can look at distributions with broad-scale data sets and how distributions of individuals change between years (which is the scale at which I’ve gotten involved with my research :)).