Day: October 30, 2018
TIme: 11:30 am
Weather: 11º C, chilly and wet, cloudy with a very small amount of sunlight streaming in through the clouds, not raining
I visited my site at the UBNA after 2 weeks and as expected a lot had changed. Just approaching the UBNA I noticed that autumn was in full swing from how many more trees looked yellower and redder.
Another thing that I noticed was the cawing of lots of crows and I even heard (and saw many gulls). While the cries of the gulls faded as I approached my site, the crows could still be heard loud and clear.
I know that crows are common birds in cities but I did hear them a lot more than usual. This could maybe have something to do with the fact that for the first time, I visited my site in the morning (versus late afternoon/early evening).
As it has been raining and has been consistently wet over the past few days, there were many small puddles of water in the gravel path leading up to my site. I decided to begin my search for inverts in these pools only. While I did not find notice anything in a lot of the pool, in one pool (which was much closer to my site) I noticed a worm “swimming” in the puddle. I took a short video of it as it was very hard to make out in the picture that I took.
I observed it for a few minutes until it eventually crawled into a hole and was visible no longer. ( I tried searching through our field guide, iNaturalist, and Google Search as to what this species might be but I could not find an answer.)
When I was finally at my site, I noticed that along with the calls of the crows, I could also hear the faint calls of some other bird which sounded like a screech. I couldn’t locate the source of the calls, however.
As I mentioned before, it has been wet and rainy for the past few days which means that when I finally looked towards the ground, I saw more mushrooms in one place than I had ever seen in my life.
I was able to upload some of the images on iNaturalist and identify the species. For example, I identified the Deer mushroom (Pluteus cervinus) pictured here:
and the False Chanterelle (Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca):
The effects of autumn were quite visible on my site, many of the trees had lost most, if not all, of their leaves. I identified one of the plants to be the Red Osier Dogwood (Cornus sericea).
However, many of the plants had also retained their leaves, such as those belonging to the genus Rosa and grasses along lake.
(This plant’s fruits look like tiny pomegranates, in my opinion)
As I was hanging around this plant I noticed my first insect- a bee! It was flying near the plant and then after that, It flew close to some wildflowers. It would pause around one flower and then move on to next. I observed the bee till there was a sudden change in the lighting around me and I looked up at the sky. When I looked down again, I couldn’t find the bee anymore. I drew a sketch from memory when I got back to my dorm.
Later I identified this bee to be the Western Honeybee (Apis mellifera) and learned that it is actually not native to North America.
I decided to head closer to the lake to find more insects. In the process, the seeds of a plant got stuck on my shirt. I wouldn’t have minded them if they weren’t so prickly. For the rest of the day, I was pulling out the seeds from my shirt and pants.
They came from this plant (I still haven’t identified it ):
On the big dead tree on my site, I was able to find many small spider webs but no spiders. In many of the webs I spotted old decaying dead insects.
I noticed a tiny black insect (smaller than a fruit fly) in abundance around the area. As I set my notebook down to look for more of them, one came and sat on my notebook for quite a long time.
There were many of its kind around me but they wouldn’t stay still for anything over 5 seconds so it was really hard to keep track of them. Since I found them where the land meets water and there’s a lot of wet mud and decaying plants, I think they might prefer moist habitats. They kept jumping around so I couldn’t really find any patterns in their behavior.
I decided to come back out and look for more insects. As I was just standing and observing the area around me, I noticed very small translucent white insects flying around. They were very hard to make out in the absence of proper sunlight but I could notice them around me. I don’t even know what their actual shape was like because they mostly just appeared as a blur but using Google and iNaturalist, I was able to figure out that they might be Whiteflies (Family Aleyrodidae).
The next place where I looked for insects was around the mushrooms. In the past, I’ve seen many insects crawling around/over them. I managed to find a fly on the mushroom. Throughout the time I spent observing it, it did not move anything more than a few millimeters. Even when I was right over it with my phone it did not move! This surprised me a lit because in my experience, flies are quite vigilant and are able to escape danger quite easily. Maybe this fly was injured and unable to move?
Here’s my sketch of it. It might belong to the genus Calliphora.
After that, I decided to look more through the ground. Using a stick, I dug through the mulch, which was quite wet. I found a layer of white colored fungus spread throughout the ground below the top layer of mulch which makes sense as the mulch hold a lot of moisture and makes it an ideal habitat for fungus. I also found very tiny yellow spider-like inverts moving below the top layer of mulch. They were moving really fast and it was really hard to get them to be still. As I kept digging and finding more of them they kept moving deeper into the ground. It was hard to keep track of them because they were moving really fast but I was able to take a video of one that I found. You’ll have to look very closely and concentrate on the invert otherwise you’ll lose sight of it.
I was able to sketch it but I doubt that the sketch is very accurate since these creatures were moving so fast. I was able to recognize the invert as being an arachnid. More specifically, it might be a clover mite (Bryobia praetiosa).
I found another invert while digging through the mulch- a worm! Its body was only half visible. I watch it wiggle around for a while and then I thought that maybe I should dig around it to see if I can figure out what the rest of its body looks like. This was a bad idea. In the process of digging, I lost the worm and could not find it again.
After looking at a lot of pictures of worms online, and based on the worm’s really dark color and prominent segments, I think this might be a Red Worm (Eisenia fetida). It could be a common earthworm but to me, its color seems too dark reddish-brown for that.
Finally, here are pictures of my site at 2 spatial scales.
And another picture of my site (just because I think it’s very pretty)
As I was leaving I could hear the quacking sounds of the mallards and I saw a lot of them on the lake. They were really far away from me hence the picture quality is bad (also I’m just a bad photographer)
Just a few seconds after I took this picture something disturbed them and most of them flew away.
Field Journal 