Bog plants and bird feeder

Just after mid-May, the alders and cottonwoods were suddenly (so it seemed) in full leaf, the fresh, bright green a pleasant contrast with the dark conifers. Even the blueberries and other understory shrubs made a new layer of green above the mosses. Hermit thrushes added their welcome voices to the canopy and fox sparrows tuned up in the thickets.

Early in the fourth week of May, I poked around in some low-elevation bogs (muskegs). Several species were beginning to flower—bog blueberry with deep pink buds and young flowers, bog laurel with broad, pink petals, and bog rosemary with small, pink flowers. The white flowers of trailing raspberry (or five-leaf bramble) starred the mosses under the scattered trees. The distinctive few-flowered sedge was surprisingly colorful, with vibrant green leaves and a yellowish inflorescence. An unidentified sedge with pale green leaves was common but only a few were yet in flower. Labrador tea, lupines, and buckbean were budding. Round-leaf sundews were still just tiny rosettes, their sticky, insect-catching leaves glittering in the sun.

I found a single specimen of a weird little herb (Geocaulon lividum) sometimes called bastard toadflax , but also known as pumpkinberry or timberberry or other common names. Seldom common, it is nevertheless widely distributed across northern North America. It’s a hemiparasite—getting some of its nutrition from its green leaves and some by parasitizing the roots of other plants. It’s not fussy about its host plants; it parasitizes anything and everything from pine trees and blueberry bushes to asters and horsetails to sedges and grasses and even others of its own species.

Photo by David Bergeson

This plant makes only a few small inflorescences; each inflorescence typically has three flowers, usually one female flower in the middle, flanked by two male flowers that drop off eventually. The open flowers are dull yellowish-green with purple marks and I’m guessing they are pollinated by flies or beetles. The orange-red fruits are few, each one with a single seed. Very little seems to be known about seed germination and dispersal. But the seeds are sometimes harvested and cached by Arctic ground squirrels up north and presumably eaten, perhaps sometimes dispersed, by other rodents. It seems likely that birds would take the colorful, fleshy fruit and potentially disperse the seeds.

The fruit has plenty of sugar in it, especially when fully ripe at the end of the season (usually late summer). Estimates of sugar content found that each fruit has about thirty milligrams of sugar, which is more than blueberries or most other fruits in Southeast. Despite the sugar content, the fruit is reported to be just barely edible or tasteless to humans.

Here at home, there’s lots of action on the pond. As many as five male mallards gather, all good pals now that their lady friends are incubating eggs. That changes, though, when one late-nesting (or re-nesting) couple shows up, and the male of that pair harasses the peaceful gang, keeping them well away from his mate.

The bird feeders are busy places. Siskins, juncos, chickadees, and nuthatches visit the seed feeder that hangs over the pond. A jay slams into the side of that feeder, knocking cascades of seeds down for the ducks.

The peanut-butter feeders are the most fun. They’re just little blocks of wood with pits drilled into them, to hold a small gob of peanut butter. Chickadees and nuthatches went crazy over them, but now the juncos almost monopolize them. Juncos are not nearly as agile as the smaller birds, but they cling and stretch (and often fall off) to get a nice bite. Sometimes they perch on the deck railing and fly up to stab and grab out a bill-full.

The jay does the stab-and-grab method too, but he’s a bit rougher, hitting one of the smaller peanut-butter feeders hard enough to knock it off its hanger, so it fell to the deck and broke into four pieces. But that’s not the end of the jay’s mischief. It has started to come to the deck railing to scarf up leftover bits of cat food that I commonly leave out for a raven. One day that jay made off with a whole set of chicken ribs, a load that it could barely carry to a nearby tree. The raven was out of luck again.

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Columbia Spotted Frogs

A friend told me about a place where frogs were breeding, so I went to look. Not a frog in sight, except for a pair of legs disappearing under an algal mat. But I went back a few hours later, when the day had warmed up, and there they were—at least a dozen of them. The males were singing, if one can call it that: the ‘song’ is a series of grunts, and different males sang on slightly different pitches. Occasionally an eager male approached another frog and tried to grab it from behind, which is the usual position for fertilizing eggs as they emerge from a female. Males have sturdy forearms and strong thumbs for the purpose of holding a female in an embrace called amplexus. But as I watched, the male was kicked off by the presumed female; either she wasn’t ready to mate or ‘she’ was really another ‘he’.

Those singing frogs are probably Columbia spotted frogs, which are native to Southeast Alaska, occurring chiefly in the transboundary river valleys. How they got to Juneau is not known—possibly with help from humans. However, in recent years, they have been seen in several places in the Mendenhall Valley and, a few years ago, specimens were sent to an expert for genetic analysis, which determined the species identity.

Photo by Kerry Howard

Columbia spotted frogs hibernate in ponds, springs, beaver dams, and under stream cut-banks where it doesn’t freeze and moisture has adequate dissolved oxygen for them to breathe (through the skin). However, they are not dormant in winter; they can move around, sometimes several meters underwater to a new wintering spot. Come spring, males emerge first; they (unusual for amphibians) then choose an egg-laying site in warm, shallow water. Later-emerging females (up to 100mm long) find the males’ chosen sites. They are larger than males (up to about 70mm) and can lay hundreds of eggs in a globular mass.

Each fertilized egg is surrounded by two jelly layers and takes up to three weeks to hatch; the time is shorter when the water is warm. The tadpoles are about eight millimeters long when they hatch. They can grow up to ninety millimeters (total length) by the time they lose their tails, grow legs, and look like little frogs, but some transform at smaller sizes. If conditions are right, they may transform in their first summer, but otherwise they can hibernate until the next year. The froglets grow but don’t become sexually mature for two to six years, depending on conditions. Males mature at an earlier age than females but have shorter lives, on average. Adults can live for several years: in some regions up to about twelve years for females and ten years for males, but elsewhere just seven years for females and three for males.

The frogs feed primarily on a variety of small insects but also eat snails, worms, and (rarely) a tadpole. Tadpoles are typically herbivorous: they scrape vegetation and filter the fragments; they also filter detritus and occasionally scrape a dying tadpole.

Spotted frogs show a fair degree of site fidelity for breeding and hibernation. They can travel quite long distances overland, from a hibernation site to a breeding site. Then they may move to a summer feeding site and eventually back to a hibernation site. Travels up to about six hundred meters long have been recorded.

This species, along with other amphibians in North America, is at risk from a lethal fungus infection that has decimated other amphibian populations. Spotted frogs (and our western toads, wood frogs, and other native amphibians) are legally protected: one is not allowed to “hold, transport, or release” them without a permit from ADFG.