Natural Connections

Cade Campbell is from Bristol, Tennessee, and is currently studying Biology at East Tennessee State University. An avid naturalist, he spends most of his free time outdoors, and has both worked and volunteered with the Blue Ridge Discovery Center as a naturalist, and as a field technician elsewhere. Cade recently finished his tenure as a Summer Naturalist Intern at the Cable Natural History Museum.

Where species once migrated south to escape a wall of ice, they must now escape in the opposite direction to avoid excessive heat. My beloved Appalachians are being inundated by wildlife from much farther south. Locations with habitat similar to the Northwoods mere decades ago host life more reminiscent of habitats in the coastal Carolinas or Georgia. Cold-adapted species are forced north or to an untimely local extinction.

This means the Northwoods are receiving new waves of southern species, from great crested flycatchers to swamp darner dragonflies…and for a short time, me. As I prepare for my own migration back south after a summer in the Northwoods, I’m saying goodbye to spruce and fir, black-capped chickadees, and the scarlet clusters of bunchberries. To the wild sarsaparilla, Mayflower, and moccasin-flower I can just say, “I’ll see you at home.” …At least for now.

The voices filtering through our Boundary Waters campsite were so calm and sweet-sounding it took me a minute to process the words: “Hey, bear.”

Lake water dripped from my swim shorts, and I continued toweling off in the sun while the meaning sank in. “Hey, bear!”

Looking across the wilderness campsite, where a group of colorful tents lined the woods on the way back to the latrine trail, I saw a fuzzy black shape in their midst. Ally and Caleb, a young couple who’d been resting in a hammock, were calmly talking to the bear, waving their arms, and doing all the right things to let the bear know that camp was full of humans without startling it. The bear did not care.

Ghost pipe is generally declared a parasite, but radioactive phosphorus first injected into ghost pipe was later found in neighboring trees. Nature is rarely as simple as we think.

When I shared this relationship with a group of Wisconsin Master Naturalist students, they were indignant. Our culture loathes a mooch. “What good is it?” they asked. “What’s its purpose?”

The purpose of any living thing—at least from its own perspective—is to make more of itself. This flower is surely doing that. I could tell my students weren’t satisfied, though. We’re always looking for a benefit to US, or at the very least, a benefit to the ecosystem. “Its beauty isn’t enough?” I countered with a smile.

In fact, that beauty may be important.

While the blob looked more like a patterned glass art piece than a living being, it is actually formed of hundreds of genetically identical, physiologically interconnected animals called zooids. Similar to coral in their colonial lifestyle, each individual zooid is made up of an outer sleeve-like structure that produces a gelatinous exoskeleton; a mass of organs that can move within the sleeve; and the lophophore, which is a ring of tentacles that filters food particles out of the water. Instead of pooping out waste, a zooid just grows a new sack of organs when the old one fills up. 

This week Olivia Rataezyk talks about different types of bird banding.

Olivia Rataezyk is from Seattle, Washington and studies biology at Kenyon College in Ohio. On campus, she divides her time between a research lab studying birds (her favorite animal) and her college’s art gallery. Olivia just finished her tenure as a Summer Naturalist Intern at the Cable Natural History Museum.

With a nice mix of clay, silt, and sand, these loamy mesic, or middle moisture, soils are not too dry and not too wet. They form the foundation for the rich variety of plant life in the northern mesic forest, where hardwood trees such as sugar maples, basswoods, and yellow birch mix with Eastern hemlock and eastern white pine.

Deer flies are the bane of summer here in the Northwoods—and around the world. Only Iceland, Greenland, and Hawaii are safe. Just as the black flies become a distant memory and the mosquitoes are relegated to “mosquito hour” in the evening, the deer flies start interfering with our beautiful, sunny days above 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

The reason we dislike deer flies so much is that the females need a blood meal to fuel egg development. Unlike the precise, syringe-like mouth of a mosquito, deer flies have two scalpel-like mouth parts that they use to make a cross-shaped incision in your skin. Their saliva contains anti-coagulants to make it easier for them to lap up your blood with a sponge-like tongue.

Each nodding flower contained a lime green center pistil shaped like a stocking hat, surrounded by a lovely pink brim, with a fringe of ten pairs of pink anthers, all ringed by five white petals arching gracefully toward the sky. They were just as beautiful as I’d remembered.

It’s hard to begrudge pipsissewa a little bit of stolen sugar, when that energy allows their sweet flowers to brighten up their dark forest home.

As the sheer, white curtain material of my mom’s homemade insect nets unfurled, small children seemed to materialize out of nowhere as if called by the Pied Piper. The wooden dowel handles with bent coat hanger frames were longer than any of the kids was tall.

The nets were light, though, and the long handles allowed us to keep feet and bare legs firmly planted in mowed grass while reaching into the tall field of goldenrod, rattlesnake master, and other flowers of the restored prairies in Honey Creek State Park in southern Iowa.

I think it was Catherine, age 9, or maybe Freyja, age 7, who caught the first spider. We all crouched around the net for a better look, and I let the spider crawl up on my hand. As she climbed, and I twisted my hand to keep her in view, the light caught her tiny abdomen and it shimmered like white satin. We oohed and aahed.