Don't Do It! Don't Investigate The Wiggly Thing!

It lays curled on top of the snow, silent and motionless except for the end of it's tail. From across the snow alert eyes of a mouse see something small and back moving on the snow's surface. Could it be food? The mouse creeps in closer and closer until WHAM! Sharp canine teeth sink into it's neck snuffing out the mouse's life. Mouse in teeth the critter scurries back to it's den, inside is the fur and feathers of other unsuspecting creatures; ptarmigan, marmots, snowshoe hare, and weasels.

Who is this terrifying predator roaming the woods you wonder. None other than this guy, the ermine.

You were thinking some HUGE predator something like a coyote or fox weren't you. He maybe small but he shouldn't be overlooked or dismissed as some cute little furry creature. Ermines are one fierce predator taking on prey as large as a snowshoe hare or something as small as a mouse.       

These cunning carnivores often are seen hunting in a zig-zag pattern leaping over a foot in each jump, which is mighty impressive for a critter that is only 6-12 inches long. They use their keen sense of smell to locate their prey by investigating every hole, crevice, and cave in the rocks. In the winter if the snow is too deep they will tunnel into the subnivian layer, or under the snow to those non-scientists out there, and move around in tunnels looking for prey.  They will even flick their tail with it's small black tip in order to lure prey in closer, their white body perfectly camouflaged against the stark white snow.

In the spring these crafty little critters change color to be white on their belly and brown on top.  (Science moment: The increasing light levels in the spring trigger a hormonal change which causes their fur to gradually fall out leaving changing them from white to brown. The same thing happens in the fall. As the days shorten the hormonal change is triggered and the fur changes from brown to white.) Their high metabolism means they have to eat every day, so to make sure they always have a meal ready even when they can not catch one. They cache dead things in hole so there is always something to eat.

Look hard the next time your out in the snow and see if there are two small eyes starting back at you.

If you want to see some other cute ermine pictures check out Meg Sommers' web page she just captured some amazing photographs of an ermine in Yellowstone National Park. 

Cool Stuff You Never Knew About Snow!

Snow everybody's favorite four letter word has been falling a lot lately even in places where snow is a whole new concept. Well, I've been pondering snow, walking in snow, snowshoeing in snow, post-holing in snow up to my waist a bunch recently. So, here are three interesting facts I have learned about snow over the last few weeks as I prepared to teach an advanced snow science class.




1) It doesn't need to be warm to melt snow.
The temperature here in Colorado has been all over the map, 50 degrees one day 20 degrees the next with a lovely (said with a huge amount of sarcasm) wind. I was pondering the snow fluctuations recorded by our SNOTEL trying to get a handle on why if we get 241 inches of snow (that's a little over 20 feet) in an average year (October to June) why there never seems to be more than about 41-70 inches at any one time at the SNOTEL gauge?  The obvious answer is it melts. The only thing is while it can be 50 degrees at my house at the SNOTEL site, 3,000 feet above my house, the temperature ranged from 24-31 degrees Fahrenheit. So where the heck is all the snow going? Sublimation is the answer!  The constant 30-60 mile per hour winds are causing the snow to go straight from a solid into a gas without needing to melt first. A scientific paper I read showed the snow pack in the research location, not too far from where I work, decreased by 15% each year just due to sublimation.


2) Fresh power makes my eyes hurt!
Ever wonder why it seems brighter right after a light fluffy snow falls than a few days later?  Freshly fallen snow has the ability to reflect 90% of the solar rays which hit it's surface. After a few days when the snow has a chance to compact it looses some of its ability to reflect sunlight and only can reflect about 50% f the sunlight hitting it.


3) Best Insulation Ever!
There is naturally a small amount of heat radiating up from under the surface if the ground. Build yourself a snow cave and you can trap some of that radiating heat to help keep yourself warm.  Small animals, such as mice, have figured this out. While the surface of the snow maybe frozen solid the natural heat radiating from the ground causes the lower layers to melt slightly changing the shape of the ice crystals. This new crystal shape looks like sugar grains, hence the name sugar snow, this snow is much easier for small critters to move through than the hard wind packed snow on the surface. 

It's -17 Degrees and I'm Heading Outside!!!! Maybe?

The Polar Vortex has Wisconsin squarely in it's sights. Dog owners are breaking out the booties before letting the dog out to do their business and schools under the Vortex have closed for a cold day.  (For those of you reading this somewhere warm a cold day is where the temperature/wind chill is so cold that it is considered too dangerous to stand outside and wait for the bus.)

                                               Buck in his winter booties. By Peter Zuzga


In my years of living here, there and everywhere I've lived in some pretty cold places. Thankfully though I never owned a thermometer. I never needed a contraption to tell me how cold it was all I had to do was listen to the snow. The higher the pitch of the snow squeak the colder the temperature.  When you walk your weight squishes the snow causing it to melt slightly and "flow" out from under your boot, but when the temperature of the snow gets below 14 degrees Fahrenheit the snow doesn't melt as you step down on it. The squeaking is the sound the ice crystals make as they move against each other.  The louder the squeak the colder the temperature. While going to college in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont (Johnson State College) my fiends and I had our own ideas of what cold was. If you made it across our small campus and your eyelashes were frozen together and the moisture from your nose had frozen your scarf fast to your face for most of your next class THAT WAS COLD! Squeaky snow not so cold.

Today it is cold and tonight is going to be even colder, oh the possibilities!! Nerds and science geeks across the vast world wide web have posted and blogged about ways to have fun in the cold. Maybe it all those years I spent teaching afterschool science experiment classes that is making me want to try all those experiments you can only do when it is REALLY COLD!  First on the list freezing a cup of boiling water instantly.   I'll let this really smart person explain.

 



 Next on the list frozen bubbles. You can also take one of those big bubble wands and just hold it out to watch the ice crystals form on the big loop.

Then there is my favorite cold weather experiment which you don't need it to be this cold outside to do. Blubber, blubber, blubber. This is really simple all you need is some blocks of lard (animal fat sold in grocery stores everywhere) and a few sealable bags. Take the lard and two sandwich sized bags and squish one block each into the bag. You want a lot of lard in each bag taking out as much of the air as possible. Then take another bag and place your two lard filled bags inside it. Stick one hand in-between the two lard filled bags in some ice water. The layers of lard will insulate your hand and keep it from feeling cold. This was a favorite of mine as a way to talk about insulation. I would then make kids insulate film canisters filled with liquid using natural insulation which animals collect to line their nests with.  Once they had insulated the canister we would place them in a snow drift and wait 25 minutes inside. The kids with the worst insulation would get and edible ice pop while those with the best insulation got chilled juice.

If you have fun trying any of these experiments, BUNDLE UP exposed skin can freeze in 30 minutes or less at these temperatures!!

More science experiments you can have fun with indoors where it is warm. Caution and a responsible adult needed.

http://kidscorner.org/html/science2.php
http://eo.ucar.edu/webweather/activities.html
http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/experiments.html

Donner and Blitzen Wears Night Vision Goggles!!!!

Soon Santa will he hitching up his reindeer to his sleigh to fly around the world dropping presents here and there. His stealthy reindeer will be sporting built in night visions goggles.  Most of us have heard about how Rudolph saved the day by using his shiny nose to light the way, but new research shows reindeer have built in night vision goggles which makes Rudolph's nose useless.

I've had people ask me what is the difference between reindeer and caribou, so reindeer are a domesticated animal and a caribou is a wild animal. Reindeer tend to be much small and are a slightly different color than their wild caribou cousins.


Caribou live in very extreme climates of Alaska, Scandinavia, and Russia where there is 19-20 hours of sunlight in the summer and 5-7 hours of daylight in the winter.  Caribou have an very cool adaption which helps them to deal with these light extremes.  They actually change the way the tapetum in the back of their eyes work. Click here for a cool picture of the color of their eyes in the different seasons. Like many animals which come out a night or are most active during the early morning and late evenings they have a tapetum, a reflective layer of cells in the back of their eyes, which allows their eye to collect the most amount of light making it easier for them to see.  Caribou take this one step further and through creating more or less pressure in their eyes, depending on the season, pack the tapetum cells closer together or spread them out. Spreading them out during the brighter summer season allows them to reflect more light back out through their eyes, but in the winter caribou increase the pressure in their eyes causing the tapetum cells to pack closer together. These closely packed cells allow caribou to catch more light making it much easier for them to see in the darkness. Adjustable night vision goggles!   

So have no fear whatever the reindeer the caribou will be able to see their way to your house to drop off those presents.

More fun stuff about caribou.
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/caribou/
http://www.livescience.com/17621-surprising-facts-reindeer-caribou.html
http://www.fws.gov/alaska/nwr/arctic/carcon.htm
http://www.mnh.si.edu/arctic/html/caribou_reindeer.html

Leaf Envy....

I was recently reading a publication from the Smithsonian which pointed me to all sorts of cool digital projects to help to connect people and science. I won't bore you with the specifics of the ebook, but if your so inclined you can read it for yourself by clicking here.

One project they were involved in is Leafsnap. These super smart people have designed an app for all of us who have looked at a plant and thought "what's that?" It is remarkably simple, snap a picture of a leaf and the app will search it's database and give you a list of possible plants. Click on one of the plant names and BAM a snapshot of information on where it grows, what the habitat is like, and when it blooms, and so much more! There are some limitations to the app right now, such as it is not available for Android and the plants are limited to mainly the Eastern United States. But, I played with it on a friends iPad and it worked pretty well.  "Do they have something like that for bug?" my friend asked.  "Umm, no." I replied.

While yes, there are a number of bug related apps out there (click here for a list of 5 bug apps), there are none where you to snap a picture of a bug and get a list of possible suspects. A number of years ago a software company sent the company I worked for at the time a prototype of a program which would allow us to take a microscope picture and it would identify it. So, we grabbed a bunch of bugs and sat down to run it through its paces. LET DOWN! See bugs use all sorts of mimicry to make them look like some thing poisonous or painful to a predator. It is tiny little differences which set them apart. For example, if I were to show you these two bugs side by side what would you say they were?

 

Having done this to countless school teachers and chaperones in front of their students, all of them say bees. Wrong! Only one of these is a bee the other is  a hover fly or flower fly. The fly (the bug on the left) mimics the bee (the bug on the right) to avoid getting eaten by predators. 

If you look really closely at the bug on the left you would notice some subtle differences. 

1) This bug only has one pair of wings where bees have two.
2) Flies have rather large eyes which appear to cover most of their head and bees have a definite space between them.
3) Right behind the fly's wings you will find halters or calypters.

In this picture of a crane fly you see two qtip like structures right behind the wings before you get to the last pair of legs. 

In this picture of a fly you see the large flat disks, calypters, right behind the wings.
Both the calypters and halters both help the fly to change direction in flight, but make them hard for a computer program to correctly identify these bugs. Until computers programs become better at seeing tiny little differences in insects we will just have to keep identifying our insects the old fashion way with taxonomic keys. 

I break for Porcupines!

In a fit of boredom I was looking at the roadkill tracking websites for California and Maine.  I wasn't overly surprised by some of what I saw on their sites, for instance California has a lot of dead racoons, skunks, and opossums.  But when I looked at the Maine site I was saddened by what I saw, lots of dead porcupines. I have a soft-spot for porcupines because they get a bad rap. Really who can resist this level of cuteness in a woodland creature?  I know what your thinking they have razor sharp spikes that they can throw at you, how can you think it's cute?  First of all let's do a little experiment. Stand up and move away from whatever your reading this on and in your best headbanger move bang your head forward making sure not to hit anything.  Are strands of your hair stuck into the nearby wall? No, I didn't think so.  A common urban myth is that porcupines can throw their quills, those spiky things on their backs, which is not true. They can throw their quills about as well as you can throw your hair across the room after all a quill is nothing more than modified hair.  Porcupines when they feel threatened will whip their tails around and whack at their attacker leaving them full of some of those 30,000 quills. Porcupines will also arch their backs, raise their quills in a defensive posture, and shake when their attacker gets near increasing the chances of one or more of the quills having enough force to get lodged in their attacker.

These quills are a work of art when it comes to animal defense. They are hollow and barbed (hooked) at one end which allow them to stick easily into anything. Once these quills are embedded in something warm they expand making them harder to remove. Muscle twitching also helps to drive the quill deeper into an animals or human's skin. So the best thing to do if you end up with a porcupine quill in you is to relax that muscle and pull the quill out with a pair of pliers. If you forgot to bring your first aid kit with you have no fear porcupine quills have a antibacterial fatty layer on them, so you have a little while to get back to where you can was your wound and put a bandage on. 
Quills are not just good for defense they also serve the purpose of helping the porcupines to float. Quills are hollow in the inside and since porcupines have about 30,000 it acts as a built in life preserver which is useful to an animal which is an avid swimmer.

So why are their so many dead porcupines in Maine? Probably because their is so much great habitat for them there. They love to eat hemlock, birch, maples, and skunk cabbage just to name a few.  They roam through forests and wetland areas following their nose to tasty bits.  While they have a great sense of smell they have bad eyesight.  Porcupines also have a love of salt which has led them to eat such crazy things as outhouse seats and wooden canoe paddles.  During some times of the year the porcupines maybe drawn to the roads because we humans salt road surfaces and porcupines being slow moving dark colored nocturnal animals motorists just don't have enough time to get out of their way.  The rest of the year they just fall victim to trying to cross the roads to get over to a preferred foods and not moving fast enough.

Want to know more:
http://animal.discovery.com/mammals/remove-porcupine-quills.htm
 http://www.outdoors.org/publications/outdoors/2009/wildwisdom/porcupine-bounty.cfm
http://www.nhptv.org/natureworks/porcupine.htm
http://theiwrc.org/kids/Facts/Mammals/porcupine.htm

TURKEYS!!!

Staying in with the holiday spirit I thought I would wax poetic about about turkeys since this time of year I see them everywhere. Wild turkeys travel in a gang, like this one.

I ran into these three turkeys while out for a walk in one of Madison, WI city parks. Only thing was they were not alone.

THEY JUST KEPT COMING! All told there were 16 turkeys lurking in the woods.  I did my best to give them their space, but wherever I went they were pretty close behind. I zigzagged they zigzagged, I turned around and jogged back down the trail they jogged down the trail after me.

Now most people I know would not be worried by this, but me I'm scared of turkeys. You might say it is an irrational fear, but have you ever seen the spikes on the back of a turkey's leg?
Males use these formidable spikes to injure or kill other male turkeys during mating season. So imagine a large 6-24 pound turkey flying at your head with spikes a blazing, scary thought am I right?  Did I mention they can fly at speeds of up to 54 miles an hour?

The coolest fact I know about turkeys is using their gizzard they can crush 24 English walnuts at once.  The gizzard is a small muscular pouch in the turkey's neck which helps to break up their food into smaller pieces for digestion. This pouch often has small rocks or pebbles in it to help crush anything in it.

While the wild turkey's domestic cousin maybe fairly dumb, if you watch a group of wild turkeys you'll find they can be fairly inquisitive.  Joe Hutto’s  book and also the Nature documentary he talks about his experiences raising wild turkeys and watching their inquisitive nature. While I am not advocating adopting wild animals the documentary makes for interesting watching.


Keep your eyes peeled the next time you take a walk in the woods for smart, fast flying, spike caring heavy birds!  Just watch out for your head.