Here and there in summer

–In early August I went up Gold Ridge in hopes of finding the big, blue, broad-petalled gentian in bloom. Being a rather impatient sort, I’d tried earlier, in July, with no luck. But on this warm, sunny day, there were a few in bloom and more with buds. Higher up on the trail, I didn’t spot any, and they probably bloom slightly later up there. However, the mission was successful on this day, and a search later in the month should find lots more.

Photo by Bob Armstrong

Even if there had been none of those beautiful gentians, the day was a good one. A mountain goat was silhouetted on the ridgeline; young marmots gamboled about, while a big adult lazed on a boulder. There were several bear scats along the trail and, of course, I could not resist inspecting at least the most recent one. It was full of salmonberry seeds, along with some vegetation fibers; because the salmonberries at this elevation were not yet ripe, I knew that this bear had been foraging down lower.

Bird life was not well-represented, however: a pair of curious ravens, a robin, and an invisible sparrow pip-pipping in the alder brush. It is always a little sad when the season of bird song is over for the year. Nary a grouse or ptarmigan to be seen, and I’d seen only one brood in July. Although apparently no official census has been conducted, they seem to be much scarcer on the ridge these days than they were a few years ago. Back in 2005, the area was opened to hunting, and it is very likely that hunting has reduced the grouse and ptarmigan populations. Many of those birds were habituated to people on the trails, and many of us thoroughly enjoyed seeing them and their chicks almost any time we ventured up the ridge. Shooting them would have been easy (and very unsporting). It seems that, for the sake of a few hunters, the pleasure of many observers was reduced.

–When the sockeye come in to Steep Creek, the bears can feast. This summer, the one we know as Nicky came down late, as usual, and she does not have cubs; she’s around eighteen years old and may be slowing down a little. The cubs of Bear 153 put on a good show one evening: swinging on the willows, tussling in the grass, getting startled by a big salmon thrashing upstream, tipping over the camera gear set (by permission) in the stream, cavorting in the shallows. I had dropped by, intending to stay just a few minutes, and ended up staying almost two hours.

The few times I have gone out there to bear-watch, the crowds have been quite well-behaved, not needing much guidance from the rangers about proper conduct in bear country. But with so many people visiting the area, someone (or someone’s dog) inevitably makes a wrong move that makes the mother bears nervous and concerned about their cubs’ safety. This is a time to be especially observant of bear body-language and to give the bears even more space than usual. These bears are quite used to people and normally behave extremely well; we can keep them that way, for all of us to enjoy, if we ourselves behave properly. A new guide to staying safe around bears, including some new information, is in the works; it will be available from ADFG.

–When we were in Bartlett Cove, Glacier Bay, one day in June, we stumbled upon a female grouse that clearly had chicks somewhere nearby. Standing on big rock, she clucked and fussed, even when we stood back to see what might emerge from the tall, dense beach grasses. I circled slowly back around her rock, hoping to see the chicks as they crossed a narrow path. Well! Mama did not like that one bit, and as I inched forward, she gave a body slam to my shoulder as she flew ahead, sounding the alarm. As far as that female was concerned, I had invaded her space and she was not going to stand for it! Then we saw the eight or so chicks—they had already crossed the path and were not close to the mother’s rock at all. Nice big chicks! They all took flight away from the presumed danger (us), followed by mama.

The next day, we managed to upset a pair of greater yellowlegs as we walked out into some extensive beach meadows. Both adults yelled and swooped at us, so we knew that there were chicks in the area. We never did see those chicks, well hidden in the tall grass, and the tumult subsided as soon as we moved out onto the open beach.

–My home pond was a happening place this summer. Four different broods of mallards made it a regular stop on their rounds through the neighborhood. First, there was a brood of ten ducklings (known as the Tens), then a brood of five (the Big Fives), a brood of eight (the Eights), and a later brood of five (the Little Fives). Seldom was there more than one brood on the pond at a time; if two broods happened to be there, one dominated the area under the hanging seed feeder. There was a nice rain of seeds falling from that feeder, as the juncos scratched among the loose seeds and the jays tipped the whole feeder off balance. This was manna from heaven! And not to be shared. The Eights would advance upon the Little Fives, pushing them into a corner of the pond, and go back to gobble up falling seeds. On another day, the roles would be reversed, the Little Fives winning the prize. The Big Fives sometimes charged at The Eights, relegating them to the far upper end of the pond, and went back to snarf up the seed rain.

Several broods of juncos (and their parents) grew fat on the seed offerings, and I watched the young ones gradually acquire their adult plumage. Bears wandered through but did not bother with the inaccessible feeder. I watched two predators with evil intentions about ‘my’ ducks, but they departed, still hungry. A roaming dog threatened one brood, and the mother duck led that dog a merry chase in her version of a broken-wing act: back and forth went dog and duck, the duck always just two or three feet ahead of the dog. She could have just flown away, but she was intent upon keeping that dog away from her young ones. The dog did not respond to orders from the shore, so eventually, my quick-thinking neighbor jumped in and grabbed the dog, and peace was restored.

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Parental care by males, part 2

This essay will consider male parental care in birds and mammals. Both birds and mammals evolved from reptiles, and some ancient reptiles did have parental care by at least one parent, but modern reptiles have no record of male parental care, so they will be ignored here. As is true for fishes and amphibians, the factors that govern the evolution of patterns of parental care are no doubt several and still subject to debate and future research.

Biparental care is the usual thing among birds: both parents tend the young in over ninety percent of bird species. Females often do the incubating of eggs, but her male may feed her while she does so and the males generally help feed the chicks. This is the case for American dippers, for instance; as one of my field techs said, during our intensive study of this species: there are no dead-beat dads! In fact, we even know of one hard-working dad who raised at least a few of his chicks by himself, after his mate disappeared. The emperor penguin male goes a step further: he incubates a single egg on his webbed feet while his mate goes off to sea and feed; then they both tend the chick.

In some taxonomic groups of birds, including hummingbirds and grouse, females generally do all the work while the males run off to find more females. But even in these groups, there are unusual species in which both parents provide parental care; the willow ptarmigan is a local example.

Still more unusual are avian species in which males both incubate and tend chicks by themselves. Here a few examples. Spotted sandpiper females often lay one clutch of eggs and leave it to the male to do the incubation and guarding while she proceeds to lay another clutch (with the same or a different male) that she incubates and tends; this is a pattern found in several shorebirds.

Spotted sandpiper nest–is this tended by the dad? Photo by Katherine Hocker

In two of the species of kiwi in New Zealand, the Australian emu, and several other species, males incubate and tend the chicks alone. The cassowaries of Australian and New Guinean rainforest also have hard-working males, who incubate the eggs for weeks and then tend the chicks for months. They are fierce defenders of their little families: One day in the Australian rainforest I encountered a cassowary family; we were all looking for fallen fruits. Imagine looking up from the forest floor and seeing a very large bird, almost as tall as you and with claws that could rip you open, glaring at you from just a few short yards away. You can bet I apologized for my presence most abjectly and discretely retreated rather quickly!

What about the mammals? Virtually by definition, females are the ones that feed the infants, and lactation is considered to be the single most expensive thing a female mammal ever does. Dependence of the infants on mother’s milk means that females are always involved in parental care, so uniparental care by males is not an option. Biparental care is not common, but males are reported to be closely involved with parental care in about five percent of all mammal species. The best known cases include carnivores and primates, but regular male care occurs in other groups too. Here are some examples:

Among the carnivores, the males of foxes and wolves regularly bring food to their young. Asian raccoon dog males participate in all forms of parental care except lactation, and also tend the female during the birth process. Male members of packs of African wild dogs bring food to lactating mothers and young pups.

Male baboons and macaques carry babies around, which may help protect the infants from predators or intruding strangers. However, this situation is more complex than that, because the male may obtain direct benefits too: a male with a baby in his arms suffers less aggression from other males and may also gain favor with the infant’s mother. And if there is a fight between males, the infants are in great danger. In some small New World primates called tamarins, including the cotton-top tamarin, males regularly carry and care for babies. Males of the endangered pied tamarin reportedly do most of the parental care except for lactation.

Wild horses and zebras live in groups, often a male’s harem of females plus foals. Males defend their foals and females from predators.

It’s a rare herbivore that helps feed the young ones, but male beaver do: they regularly help build winter caches of branches on which the whole family, but especially the still-growing young ones, feed; they also help maintain dams that make the pools that protect the lodge and facilitate transport of branches. They stay with the rest of the family in the lodge over the winter, interacting and providing body warmth. Among the smaller rodents, males of the California deer mouse reportedly brood the young, keeping them warm until they can regulate their own body temperature. Prairie vole males cache food, brood and groom the babies, and even retrieve them if they wander out of the nest.

The last throes of summer

Early September—and Gold Ridge earned its name in a botanical (rather than a mineral) way; the open slopes were covered with the golden leaves of deer cabbage. Color accents came from the scarlet berries and crimson leaves of dwarf dogwood. There were even a few scattered flowers of about ten species still in bloom, with little hope of pollination, but swathes of partridgefoot, still flowering, clothed a few protected pockets.

Black crowberries and two kinds of low-bush blueberries offered snacks to foraging birds and hikers. The very last salmon berries hid under drooping foliage.

A female grouse and a big chick tried to be invisible at the edge of an alder thicket; their patience outlasted ours, and we eventually went on up the trail. A very small marmot hustled into its burrow with a big mouthful of dry grass for a winter bed, while an adult marmot posed regally on a rock right next to the trail. The marmots will disappear for the winter very soon now.

Swarms of minute insects danced in the open spaces between the canes of salmonberry. I have no idea what they were, but surely they were in reproductive mode, trying to beat the onset of low temperatures.

On another day in early September, a stroll through the lower muskegs at Eaglecrest found some good patches of still-unripe bog cranberries and some low-bush blueberries. We saw that a few of the dwarf dogwood berries had been sampled by some small animal, leaving a hole but without removing the seed—very different from the more usual rodent foraging, which focuses on the seed, leaving a hollow fruit behind. I have to wonder who might eat the dogwood berries; I’ve seldom found the seeds in the hundreds of bird or bear scats that I’ve inspected.

A few swamp gentians were still tightly furled in bud and were probably too late for pollination, as were the one or two bog kalmias that were still open. We searched for sundews and found only three decrepit specimens where earlier there had been thousands, so we concluded that they had gone to bed for the season.

Dragonflies—the big, blue darners, mostly—still cruised the ponds and waterways in search of occasional prey. One enterprising couple flew by in copula: the male clasped the female behind her head with the grasping appendages at the end of his body, and the female looped up her abdomen under the male’s thorax where his sperm are stored. He carried her around while his sperm were being transferred to her ovaries (and perhaps he also displaced or removed sperm from a previous mating!). She would probably lay her eggs in dead wood or vegetation, where they would overwinter.

Meanwhile, the sockeye run in Steep Creek ended, and we await the arrival of the coho. The mallard ducks that visit my home pond are all in brown, eclipse plumage. A few, however, are starting to show rusty chests and darker heads that will turn green as the males don their courtship feathers. Mallards begin their courtship and mate-choice in winter—it seems to be a gradual process.

Cottonwood and devil’s club leaves are turning golden, willows sprinkle their crowns with yellow leaves, and the maples glow with yellows, orange, and several shades of red. Highbush cranberry leaves turn to pink and red, and the wild crabapple leaves get a characteristic shade of rather grubby, rusty red. Even some of the blueberries, especially in the alpine zone, are colorful. The alders get left out of this color show; their leaves turn dull brown and crinkled. Why are they so different?

Amid hundreds of ripening rose hips, I saw a single, lonely pink blossom.

“Tis the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone.

All her lovely companions

Are faded and gone”