Category Archives: insects

Kirtland’s Warbler Numbers Up in Michigan

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This year, researchers and volunteers in Michigan observed 2,063 singing Kirtland’s warbler males, up from 1,805 last year and the biggest single-year increase in the birds since 2007, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources reports.

These are the highest numbers ever for Kirtland’s warbler, a federally endangered bird, the release states. The warbler is endangered by habitat loss. It nests only in young jack pines, a habitat that only naturally occurs after periodic wild fires. Today the habitat is created through both prescribed burns and timber harvests with seeding. The birds range has expanded from Michigan’s lower peninsula, to its upper peninsula and into Wisconsin and Canada.

“We are witnessing a conservation success story,” said Michigan DNR endangered species coordinator Dan Kennedy in the release.

Read the Michigan DNR press release here.
Read more info on the species from the US Fish and Wildlife Service here.

In other songbird news:

While bark beetle outbreaks have been bad news for many throughout the West, they have been good news for mountain chickadees, at least at a local level for short periods around the time of the outbreak, says an article in the journal Ibis.

Because the birds are secondary cavity nesters, the study notes, the number of mountain chickadees in a location in a particular year ties most closely to the number of downy woodpeckers and red-breasted nuthatches the previous year.

You’ll need to pay or subscribe to read the whole paper. Find it here.

Photo: Kirtland’s warbler, courtesy Michigan Department of Natural Resources

New Spider Species Found in Oregon

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In 2010 scientists found unusual spiders in caves in southwestern Oregon. This month they described those spiders as a new genus and a new species: Trogloraptor marchingtoni. The species was described in the journal ZooKeys (and in this case “open access” doesn’t mean free access to the journal. You must pony up 33 Euros to read the article.

The abstract says that spiders in this genus are “known only from caves and old growth forest understory in the Klamath-Siskiyou region of Oregon and California.”

Read ScienceNOW from AAAS for a great photo and a brief summary of the discovery.

If you can’t get enough of new spider species news, all the usual suspects have a news story on this species:
Discover
Scientific American
Wired.

Bumblebee Blip in Utah

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A mild winter means more bumblebees in Utah, a researcher says. Particularly, one rare species that previously only had 129 bees has been seen by the dozens in one Utah city alone. This news is hopeful because, generally, bumblebees have been in decline nationwide.

Read the story in the Deseret News, here.

The story on the Utah bumblebee boom has created a lot of buzz itself, but not a single story identifies which species of bumblebee has experienced the spring population bump. I contacted the researcher, but he did not respond.

If your state also experienced a mild winter, this may be the year to search for rare bumblebee species.

Photo: bumblebee by Laura Perlick, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife

Counting Butterflies

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Maine and Minnesota both have citizen science butterfly projects.

Maine is hoping to attract 100 volunteers to survey the state for a butterfly atlas. Neighboring states and Canadian provinces (Vermont.Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Brunswick) have recently completed surveys, and a Maine butterfly atlas would round out the regional coverage.

Training will be in June.

Read this brief from New England Cable News.

In Minnesota, the state Department of Natural Resources is planning to do a population survey of the federally endangered Karner blue butterfly. Training for this survey will be held this week.

Read a short item in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, here.

Photo: Karner blue butterfly by J & K Hollingsworth, courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service

NH Dragonfly Survey

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Five years, 100 volunteers and more than 18,000 records of dragonflies and damselflies went in to the completion of the New Hampshire Dragonfly Survey.

The survey shows exactly what a good long look can do for the understanding of species population levels and distribution. The NH Fish and Game press release says:

“The good news is that most of the rarer species turned out to be far more common than previously believed,” said Dr. Pamela Hunt, who coordinated the project for NH Audubon. “We even doubled the number of sites for the state’s only endangered dragonfly – the ringed boghaunter – from 8 to 15.” Particularly impressive was the increase in sites known to support the scarlet bluet, a small red damselfly that likes lily pads. “This species was unknown in the state until 2002, and at the start of the dragonfly survey there were only five sites,” says Hunt. “Now they’re known from over 40 sites.

 

Read the NH Fish and Game press release on the dragonfly survey here.
Read the 54-page dragonfly survey final report here. (PDF)

Photo: Paddle-tailed darner, not a NH dragonfly, but what a photo. Photo by Tom Kogut, courtesy of the US Forest Service

Return of a Classic Beetle

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“The last documented American burying beetle in Missouri was collected from Newton County (southwest Missouri) in the mid-1970s,” says a US Fish and Wildlife press release. “Historically, It was recorded in 35 states, including 13 counties throughout Missouri, and was most likely found throughout the state.”

In June, the federally endangered beetle will return to the Missouri prairie, with the reintroduction of American burying beetles bred at the St. Louis Zoo. The zoo-bred beetles will be released on The Nature Conservancy’s Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie (link to more info about the reintroduction).

Local news reports seem to be focusing on the fact that this population has been declared “experimental,” so the usual Endangered Species Act protections don’t apply.
Springfield News-Leader
St. Louis Public Radio

Photo courtesy of US Forest Service

Belly Up to the Cobble Bar

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Cobblestone tiger beetles are found in 11 states, plus New Brunswick, Canada. A study in New York State published in American Midland Naturalist found that while one beetle moved 322 meters from its original capture point, the rest were recaptured at points ranging from zero to 123 meters away. One male that was captured three times over 21 days was found at distances from six to 68 meters from his original point of capture.

A total of five beetles moved between cobble bars during the study. Sometimes the beetles traveled a distance farther than the next cobble bar. The study found cobblestone tiger beetles in cobble bars with greater interior areas and higher shrub covers than other cobble bars. The paper includes a habitat model.

The idea was to collect data for a management plan, and it could contribute to your own.

Read the paper (with subscription or pay) here. Or get a free PDF here.

The Cicada Paradox

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Photo: Philip N. Cohen

As Brood XIX cicadas emerge in the South, you would think that local birds would be preparing for a once-every-13-years feast. But, rather than flocking in and chowing down, bird numbers decline in regions experiencing a periodical cicada emergence. These declines have been confirmed by the annual Breeding Bird Count (BBC) that takes place across the country in May and June.

Scientists at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, the University of Maryland, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture wondered whether the loud trill of the cicadas was drowning out bird calls, so BBC surveyors merely didn’t hear birds that were still there; whether something about the cicada emergence drove birds away from an area; or if birds experienced a true population decline during cicada emergence years.

In a study published in the journal Ecology, they compared various measures of bird populations in years of cicada emergence, and years without a cicada emergence. They also looked at those population measures in places where the cicadas could be heard, and in places where cicadas couldn’t be heard.

If it was just a matter of the surveyors not hearing birds among the din of the cicadas, the number of birds in the cicada areas would drop, while the number of birds in the non-cicada areas would stay the same. If the cicadas were driving the birds away, there would be fewer birds near the cicadas and more where the weren’t cicadas. Finally, if the number of birds declined similarly in areas with and without cicadas, then some other factor was at work.

The researchers used BBC data from the 1987 and 2004 emergences of Brood X, the periodical cicadas that live in the Mid Atlantic states. The data included whether or not the surveyors could hear cicadas at each data collection point.

They found that the number of birds declined similarly in areas where there were cicadas and areas where there weren’t cicadas within the Brood X emergence region. The findings strongly suggest a true decline in birds during these years.

What is causing that decline? The researchers could only speculate. But perhaps the mysterious environmental trigger that leads the cicadas to emerge every 13 years in the South, and generally every 17 years in the North, also influences the bird population decline — giving the cicadas the best chance of creating a new generation, without winding up as an avian snack.

Read the whole paper on the Cornell researcher’s Web site, here.

Read more about the current cicada emergence, here, in USA Today and on Nashville Public Radio.

Photo: Brood XIX cicada in Chapel Hill, NC, taken by Philip N. Cohen