Some deciduous trees forgo showy flowers, pollinate early

Buds are beginning to swell on some plants, such as the red twinberry, as the amount of daylight increases. Some plants will wait longer to ensure their leaves don’t endure cold spring nights. Other plants will wait to leaf out until after they have flowered. 

Not all plants have showy flowers like roses and apple trees, which flower after the leaves have emerged. 

Many of the native deciduous trees in north Idaho flower before they leaf out, such as aspens, cottonwoods, paper birch, alders and some willows. The flowers lack showy petals because they do not need to attract insects. Instead, the flowers are in the form of catkins, which are typically pendulous and are composed of a large quantity of same sex flowers. 

Willow catkins either appear before the leaves emerge or with the leaves

Male catkins release pollen before the leaves appear because they depend on the wind to disperse the pollen. Leaves would obstruct the wind and decrease the likelihood of pollen landing on a female flower.

Unlike flowers pollinated by insects, the pollen of wind-pollinated plants is very light and fluffy so even the slightest breeze can carry it away. Also, the pollen isn’t as sticky as pollen produced by insect-pollinated flowers because it doesn’t have to stick to an insect. Instead, the female stigma (where the pollen grain must land) is extremely sticky.

Wind-pollinated flowers also produce way more pollen than insect-pollinated flowers. A single birch catkin can produce more than five million grains of pollen.

On wind-pollinated plants, the male and female flowers are often located on separate plants. Cottonwood catkins are on separate trees, along with trembling aspen and willows. 

Aspen catkins forming seeds

By having male and female flowers on separate trees, it ensures cross-pollination and increases the viability of the species. Thus, it is crucial for copious amounts of pollen to be released by the male flower in order for at least one pollen grain to reach a female flower downwind.

Some trees, such as alder and birch, have both male and female flowers on the same tree. These plants are often “self-incompatible” which means that a pollen grain originating on that plant won’t germinate if it lands on a stigma of the same plant. 

Alders produce both male and female flowers on the same tree

Each plant produces a unique protein that prevents self-fertilization. This protein is also responsible for the allergic reaction and hay fever many people suffer from during spring. 

While less than 20 percent of plants are pollinated by wind, the copious amount of pollen produced makes them noticeable. Grasses and conifers are also wind-pollinated. 

As latitude and altitude increase, the number of wind-pollinated plants becomes more prevalent. Where the growing season is shorter, plants can get a jump-start on the season by flowering before the leaves emerge and insects appear.

Pussy willows are one of the first signs of spring

Despite snow on the ground, the pussy willow is one of the first to flower in late winter with its gray, fuzzy catkins. The pussy willow’s early catkins are one of the first signs of spring and the promise of more showy, colorful flowers to come.

Note: Published in the Bonners Ferry Herald on March 28, 2013.

No, you don’t have maggots in your house

Not a single fly buzzes through the house all winter and on a sunny spring day they all seem to come out of the woodwork--quite literally. Flies buzz and bounce off the inside of the windows trying to escape.

No, you don’t have maggots in your garbage that hatched into flies. The flies are probably cluster flies, blow flies or face flies. And they have been there since last fall. 

In the fall when the photoperiod (day length) becomes shorter and the temperatures cooler, the “clustering” flies gather on sun-warmed south and west sides of buildings. As night time falls, they crawl into any crack or crevice they can find. Then one day they don’t come out at all.

The flies will enter a suspended state, called diapause, similar to bears and marmots hibernating for the winter. Their metabolic activity decreases and they don’t reproduce or eat.

When the temperature increases and the photoperiod becomes longer they emerge from their resting place--often to the inside.

Distinguishing between the types of flies in your house requires a close look. 

Cluster flies are black, three-eighths to a half-inch long with short, yellow hairs on the thorax (middle region). Their wings also overlap when at rest. They are named for their tendency to cluster together in houses.

Blow flies are a metallic green, gray, blue or black color and are strong fliers. 

Face flies resemble house flies, which are gray with four dark, longitudinal stripes on top of the thorax. Face flies typically invade a house in the summer. 

All flies follow the same life cycle of eggs to maggots to pupa to adult fly. But each fly has a preferred medium for each stage. 

Blow flies tend to lay eggs in manure, pet waste or fresh carrion. The sudden presence of blow flies in your house may indicate a dead animal within the home, such as a mouse or squirrel. However, blow flies will seek shelter in homes for winter but the numbers are probably fewer.

House fly larvae feed on garbage, animal waste, compost or spilled animal feed. Adult females can lay 100 to 150 eggs at a time. 

The larvae of face flies develops in fresh cattle dung and are more common around farms and ranches. 

Cluster flies are not a “filth” fly. They don’t develop in garbage or dung, but instead are parasites of earthworms. A female adult fly will lay eggs in cracks in the soil. When the maggots emerge they will seek out and enter earthworms as parasites. Then they pupate in the soil after leaving the earthworm. They emerge from the soil as an adult fly and know which way is up because they are attracted to light. 

The attraction to light perpetuates for adults since they are attracted to lamps and bright windows in houses throughout the winter and spring. The cluster of flies in your windows and light fixtures will die if they don’t escape outside to find food or water. 

At least they aren’t there because you forgot to take out the garbage.

Note: Published in the Bonners Ferry Herald on March 21, 2013.

Rare White Raven

Ravens are black, rarely white. I'm lucky to have a white raven frequenting the field near our house.

Two ravens harassing a white raven

I didn't get a close look but the eyes don't appear red. Albino birds have red eyes and also lack any kind of pigmentation. The white raven could be leucistic, which means it has less than normal pigmentation resulting in a pale appearance.

White raven against a snowy hillside

Rare white raven

Photos copyright Laura Roady

Comets offer a glimpse of deep space

One doesn’t forget seeing a comet trail across the night sky for weeks. Many may remember Hale-Bopp visible in 1997 or Halley’s comet in 1986.

Typically, comets visible to the naked eye are seen once every five to ten years. But this year we have two chances. If clouds block the view this month, there will be another chance in November. 

Starting early in March, Comet Pan-STARRS (comets are named after the person, spacecraft or telescope that discovered them) became visible in the northern hemisphere. The comet was previously visible in the southern hemisphere. This comet has a narrow window to be seen, which is after sunset and before it goes below the western horizon. 

Illustration credit NASA

Comet ISON will be visible in November and is predicted to be brighter than comet Pan-STARRS and visible longer at night. 

A comet’s brightness depends on its composition and how close it orbits the sun. Like dirty snowballs, comets are composed of ice, dust, rock and gas. The comet’s frozen center is called a nucleus and often is only a few kilometers across. 

As a comet orbits closer to the sun, the sun’s heat causes the ice to change to gas. The closer the comet is to the sun, the faster the ice vaporizes.

The vaporized gas creates an atmosphere, called a coma, around the comet’s nucleus. The coma can be hundreds to thousands of kilometers in diameter. 

Solar wind and pressure from sunlight blows the coma materials away from the sun, forming a long tail. The tail always points away from the sun. 

Comets actually have two tails--a gas tail and a dust tail. The gas tail is the visible coma. The dust tail often is too dark to see. 

As the surface of the nucleus heats up closer to the sun, small particles of rock are released and form the dust tail.

Comet ISON is predicted to have an extremely bright tail because this may be the first time the comet has entered the inner solar system and passed closely to the sun.

Comet ISON is believed to have originated in the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is 465 trillion miles away at the edge of our solar system, about one light-year away, and contains several trillion icy bodies. 

An icy body becomes a comet when it is nudged from its orbit at the edge of the solar system and falls into an eccentric orbit closer to the sun. The nudging can occur from a giant molecular cloud, stars passing nearby or tidal interactions with the Milky Way’s disc. 

Comets originating from the Oort Could are called long-period (or long-term) comets because they have orbits that are longer than 200 years. Some long-period comets may take thousands to millions of years to complete one orbit. These comets, such as comet ISON or Pan-STARRS, will only be seen once in recorded history. Hale-Bopp has a orbital period of 2,537 years. 

Comets with orbits less than 200 years are called short-period comets, such as Halley’s comet which completes an orbit about every 76 years. Many short-period comets originate in the Kuiper Belt, which is a disc-shaped region beyond the orbit of Neptune. Pluto is a member of the Kuiper Belt.

The nudge that puts an icy body into an eccentric orbit around the sun allows us to see something from deep space. Comets are considered leftovers from when the solar system was created around 4.6 billion years ago. 

If the weather cooperates, two icy bodies formed billions of years ago that have traveled trillions of miles over thousands of years will grace our night-time skies for a once-in-a-lifetime view this year. 

More information: 

Comet Pan-STARRS will be visible until March 24 just after sunset. The comet will start low on the western horizon in early March and move higher into the constellation Cassiopeia by the end of March. The comet will be visible to the naked eye and will appear as a fuzzy star with a small tail, about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper. The comet will only be visible for short time after sunset and will become dimmer as the month progresses. Binoculars will enhance the view of this once-in-a-lifetime comet.

Note: Published in the Bonners Ferry Herald on March 14, 2013.

Who-Whoo is that calling in the dark?

A deep whoo, whoo, whoo-whooo, whooo-whooo resonates across the field as evening quickly fades away. The three to eight loud, deep hoots come from a great horned owl. February and March are the best times to listen for owls calling as it is nesting season for most of them. 

Great horned owl

Owls call to attract a mate and establish a territory. Typically larger owls make lower-pitched calls than small owls. Male owls also have  lower-pitched calls than females.

Cold nights don’t deter owls from sitting on eggs as early as February. Great horned owls have been known to successfully incubate eggs when nighttime temperatures drop down to as low as minus 27 degrees Fahrenheit. 

When owls nest, they don’t build their own nest. Instead, they take over the nest of others, such as crows, ravens or eagles, or nest in tree cavities or on rock ledges. 

An owl’s eggs indicate where the owls nests. Screech owls nest in woodpecker holes and their eggs are very round because they cannot fall out of the cavity. Whereas, barn owls have more oval eggs because they nest on ledges in barns or on rock cliffs. A round egg could easily roll off a ledge, but an oval egg rolls in a circle. 

Owls are raptors, also known as birds of prey, like hawks, falcons, eagles, osprey, vultures, condors and kites. All raptors are good hunters because of their eyes, beak, talons and wings.

Western screech-owl

Raptors have excellent eyesight, up to ten times stronger than our eyesight. If our eyes were comparable to an owl’s eyes, they would be the size of tennis balls. 

Unlike our eyes, an owl’s eyes are fixed in the socket and they only see in shades of gray. An owl’s eyes don’t move because they are packed full of rod cells. They have no cone cells which would allow them to see in color. 

The density of rod cells helps them see at night under the light of the moon and stars. They cannot see in complete darkness.

To compensate for their eyes being fixed in the sockets, an owl can rotate its head 280 degrees quite quickly. 

Barred owl with skeleton

An owl’s eyes are front-facing which leaves less room for a beak on its skull. Other raptors have side eyesight, such as eagles, and have a larger beak. A larger beak enables the raptor to crunch bones into smaller pieces to swallow.

Since an owl has a small beak, it cannot crush bones into small pieces. Therefore, an owl swallows bone in bigger pieces, which is evident in the owl pellets they regurgitate. 

Great gray owls, the largest owl in Idaho, can swallow a whole mouse. The mouse moves down to the owl’s crop, which separates the meat from the indigestible parts (bones, fur and feathers). Six to eight hours later the owl will silently cough up a pellet, the width of its throat, with the indigestible remains. 

Largest to smallest: Great gray owl, barn owl, northern saw-whet owl, northern pygmy-owl

Unlike other raptors that tear meat off the bone, owls eat the entire animal for the nutrition. They absorb calcium from the bones and other nutrients from the indigestible parts before they are regurgitated.

Like all raptors, owls use their sharp talons to capture prey, which ranges from rodents to birds to squirrels--even skunks for great horned owls. All birds have nails at the end of their toes, but raptors have very sharp, long, pointed nails that are curved, which are referred to as talons. 

All raptors also have over-sized wings to help them carry the weight of their prey, which can be as much as half of the bird’s body weight. Fast-flying raptors have narrow wings that come to a point with stiff feathers and a smooth leading edge. This configuration allows the raptor to fly fast but not quietly.

Fast-flying raptor's wing on top, owl wing on bottom

An owl’s wings are configured to fly slow and silently. Their round-ended, wide wings with soft feathers and fringe along the leading edge act as a muffler, allowing the owl to silently ambush its prey. With silent flight, the only time we will hear an owl is when they call. 

Note: Published in the Bonners Ferry Herald on March 7, 2013. 

Note: Thanks to Beth Paragamian, an IDFG wildlife education specialist, for bringing the live owls and owl mounts to KNWR for an owl program.