All About Moose Part 2: Subspecies and 3 Great Moose-Related Tangents

The second cool thing about Moose is that they vary regionally quite a bit, especially for a species so” young.” By young, I don’t mean necessarily how long they been existence, though Alces has only been around in the fossil record for around the last 2 million years. But more importantly, Moose went through a fairly recent population bottleneck, and as a result, the most common recent female ancestor of all Moose is thought to have lived only about 60,000 years ago (in Asia.)

Side note: Researchers figure this stuff out by looking at something called mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down generations in a straight mother-daughter line. This same type of research was behind the so-called “African Eve” or most common recent female ancestor of all humans, who for comparison, is thought to have lived around 200,000 years ago (in Africa.)

There are significant variations between not only Eurasian and North American Moose, but among North American Moose as well. The biggest clear difference between North American Moose and most (but not all) Eurasian Moose is the number of chromosomes. North American Moose have 68 chromosomes; most Eurasian Moose have 70.

Side note: There’s another great human biology analogy here. One of the clearest genetic differences between human and chimpanzees is the number of chromosomes. We have 46; they have 48, as do gorillas and orangutans. It appears that sometime in the last 5 million years, the two stubby chromosomes #2 and #3 in the chimpanzee fused and became the normal-sized human chromosome #2.

There are 8 recognized “subspecies” of Moose worldwide, 4 of them in North America. The subspecies here in Utah (and throughout the American West) is the Shiras Moose, Alces alces shirasi. The Shiras Moose is the smallest of the North American Moose, and has a slightly lighter-colored coat. The smaller size seems an adaptation to the relatively mild (by Moose standards) woodland environment they stick to here in Utah. In Alaska, by contrast, the Gigas Moose, Alces alces gigas, is substantially larger, a trait that serves herbivores well in cold environments with large open spaces (conservation of heat, defense against predators, don’t have to worry as much about getting hung up in brush/trees.)

Mating behavior also varies among subspecies. The male Shiras Moose (pic left) is a serial monogamist, dueling for, courting and mating one female at a time. The male Gigas Moose (pic right) on the other hand is a harem-keeper, keeping a small herd of females and fighting off other males. In general, harem-keeping behavior among large herbivores is more common in open/plains environments, possibly because it’s easier to round up, keep track of and “defend” a herd of females in the open than in a forest. And the Gigas Moose is more social in general. Alone among the 4 North American subspecies, it seems to have developed some semblance of “herd” behavior.

The Shiras Moose on the other hand is almost always encountered solo- the only time I’ve seen more than one moose at a time in Utah is a mother with a calf.

Tangent #1- The Moose Twins of 2007: This brings up something interesting from last summer. One of the things that’s always been a head-scratcher for me when spotting Moose is: is this the same Moose I saw last time I biked/hiked here, or is it a new one? Last summer I and several of my biking buddies encountered a mother Moose with twin calves multiple times. We saw this trio so often in the same area that we were able to get a good feel for its range, and since probably half my sightings last year were of the trio, it tells me I’m seeing the same Moose more often than not.

Tangent #2- Getting Chased By Moose: So I’ve only been chased once by a moose on my bike, in 2006, and I think it was more by accident than anything else. I was climbing the (very steep) Lamb’s Canyon Trail, and I encountered a bull Moose early on. I called and made a little noise, and he walked a bit off the trail. I passed, and about 5 minutes later I heard a clomp-clomp closing rapidly behind me. I looked back and there he was, probably 30 feet back and closing. Not charging, but moving at a decent clip. I was climbing steeply, slowly and had nowhere to go- a stream on one side and a steep embankment on the other. So I started yelling and waving one arm around like crazy, getting ready to abandon the bike and jump down into the stream bed. Fortunately the bull stopped and turned off the trail.

But the following Winter my friend Paul was chased for real. He was skate-skiing up Mill Creek Canyon (The road is closed to traffc and turned into a groomed ski trail in the Winter) and encountered a bull standing in the road/trail. Figuring he’d gone far enough anyway he turned back and started skiing down-canyon. He turned to see the bull trotting after him so he skied faster and ahead, but every time he stopped for a moment there came the bull trotting around the corner, and it chased him in this fashion almost back to the trailhead.

Tangent #3- I Can Smell Moose: So I’ve noticed a number of times after a close-Moose-encounter that there’s a particular animal smell in the air. And a couple year back I noticed the smell before sighting a Moose, and then saw a Moose just a moment or so later. This has happened several times since, and what’s interesting is that I can actually (I swear I am not making this up) smell the difference between Moose, Elk and Deer. It’s probably impossible to describe the 3 different smells, but here goes:

• Moose smells the most “animal” or “livestock-ish” of the 3, almost like a “woodsy” horse.

• Elk smells really strong and musky, sort of like a cross between a Moose and a bad men’s cologne.

• Deer smells- really strangely- the most human of the 3. Not that it smells like a human, but that it smells somehow more human than moose or elk. Sort of like a sweaty human who’d been out in the woods for a while, but with a touch of animal in the scent as well.

Smell is a weird sense. It seems like it can sometime trigger an instant recognition or a super-clear memory faster than anything else. But that goes beyond moose, and may be the topic for a future post.

No posting for a few days. Wife and I head to Mendocino tomorrow for 5 days for our 10th anniversary. Should be a great trip, with a whole lot of interesting and different trees, but doubt I’ll have time to blog.

Tangent: This is the first of 3 trips to California this summer: 1^st this one (very fun), then less than a week later I’ll go to San Diego for a week for my company’s annual user conference (not fun), and then again in August, we (whole family) will go to Tahoe for a week (very fun.)

Final note: We're finally in Stage 4 of the morning birdsong cycle. I woke this morning to complete silence at 4:45AM. At 4:54 one anemic-sounding robin started half-assedly chirping...

Final FINAL note: Most of the great Moose info I dug up for these last 2 posts was generated by Kris Hundertmark of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who has been good enough to make copies of his research available online. Thanks Kris!

All About Moose Part 1: Newer Than Indians

No, still not blogging about Mountain Mahogany. Today is Moose Day, and for a couple of good reasons. First, I had my 2nd Moose encounter of the season yesterday up above Jeremy Ranch. Second, mtn biking in the early AM or PM you see more Moose in the Wasatch in the summer than any other large animal. Third, I’ve been blogging overwhelmingly about plants, some about birds, but almost nothing about mammals. And fourth, I got some nice shots, finally redeeming myself as a wannabe wildlife photographer.

I probably see Moose, Alces alces, a dozen-plus times a year, almost always while mountain biking, though I did see a couple XC skiing back in March.

Tangent: Mtn biking in the early morning or early evening is the best way to see Moose in the Wasatch in the summer. Most of the summertime riding is between 7,000 and 9,000 feet, which is exactly where Moose hang out in the summer. A mtn biker covers far more distance than a hiker in a given outing, increasing his/her chances of intersecting a Moose’s path, and usually travels fairly quickly without generating a lot of noise, so chances are better of seeing a Moose before it heads away from you.

In fact Moose are so common in the Wasatch that you come to almost take them for granted, which is unfortunate, because they’re pretty amazing animals. An adult Moose east something like 50 lbs of food per day, in country where I can’t even dig up a single edible corm. And Moose can be dangerous- supposedly more people are killed by Moose than bears in North America. (Can't remember where I read that- it's probably bogus, but it's a good attention-grabber...)

Everyone knows what a Moose is and looks like, and other than re-hash a few nature-oriented websites, it may seem like there’s nothing new or interesting to tell about Moose in Utah. But there is.

How Moose Got Here

Here’s the coolest thing, that hardly anybody is aware of: There were no Moose in North America until around 14,000 years ago. And no Moose South of the ice sheets until less than 13,000 years ago. That means there were no Moose in Utah before there were people in Utah, and what’s more, that might not be a coincidence.

Prior to 13,000 years ago, North America had a way, way, different set of megafauna, or big animals tooling around. Not just Mammoths, but mastodons, giant sloths, dire wolves, saber-tooths, and a whole mess of other large animals than all went extinct in a span of just 300 or 400 years. The cause of the extinction is still debated, but it is suspiciously coincident with the arrival of human hunters.. (This is called the Overkill Hypothesis, and it’s the most commonly accepted reason for the megafauna extinction.)

Before the extinction, there were big moose/deer-like creatures living in North America, but they weren’t modern Moose, Alces alces. But after the extinction, the biological “moose-niche” was essentially vacated, and Moose, which had entered North America via Beringia (around the same time as humans) migrated down through the gap in the receding ice sheets to colonize the rest of Northern North America.

What’s even cooler is that this same process happened with several other large mammals. Prior to 13,000 years ago there were no Grizzlies in the Lower 48. Instead there was a now-extinct type of bear called the Short-faced bear. The Short-faced Bear was a running bear, faster, bigger and meaner than any Grizzly alive today. After the Short-faced bear disappeared, Grizzlies from Alaska and the Canadian Arctic migrated South and filled the “bad-ass-bear-niche” in the lower 48. Prior to the extinction, the Dire Wolf roamed the lower 48. Like a modern wolf, but bigger, stronger (and presumably meaner.) When it disappeared, modern wolves migrated southward and filled the “hunting canine” niche.

Side note: Interestingly, it seems that something similar may be going on over the past century. As wolves have been eliminated from most of the continental US, Coyotes have thrived, filling the “hunting canine” niche and colonizing areas- such as the Eastern states- they never previously inhabited.

This whole megafauna-extinction-and-alternative-mammal-recolonization story is a great one, because it provide another perspective of that “intermediate timescale” change we’ve talked about in looking at a number of plants, including Creosote, Joshua Trees and Ponderosa Pine. The untouched, biological “wilderness” as we think of it in the American West is really a pretty recent construct, more dynamic than static, constantly molded by people and climate.

3 Purple Wildlowers, 2 Cool Things About Each, a Really Big Tangent on an Osmia Bee

Yes I know I said I was going to blog about Mountain Mahogany next, but I got distracted by more wildflowers when I was biking up around Pinebrook yesterday afternoon and decided to blog about three purple ones.

Tangent: In the later Spring/early Summer, as trails melt out higher up, I do most of my mtn biking higher up in the Wasatch. For years my friends and I drove up to Park City, but for the last 4 years we’ve been doing more summer riding up around Jeremy Ranch and Kimball Junction. In this area, about 15 minutes drive closer to Salt Lake, on the North side of I-80, a significant network of trails have been developed over the last 5 years or so between 6,000 and 8,000 feet. On the South side, up behind the Pinebrook subdivision, is and even better, more accessible, and far less trafficked trail network that we’re still finding new routes on after 4 years. Technically the trails are “private”; we’re not really sure what that means, and we’ve never been challenged over access. The Pinebrook trails (crude, incomplete map that I started and never finished 4 years ago left) are all singletrack, twisty and technical enough to be challenging, but all very clean-able. Most are set in deep enough forest that you have the feeling of being out in the middle of the boonies, even though you’re almost always within a mile of houses. The Pinebrook trail network eventually connects to the Mid-Mountain trail, giving you the option of linking up over to Park City or even up and over back to Salt lake Valley. As if all that weren’t reason enough to ride there, it’s a great area for moose and elk.

3 Purple Wildflowers, and 2 Cool Things About Each

First is this guy, Western Clematis, Clematis occidentalis. The first cool thing about it is its flowers, which have not petals, but has colorful sepals instead, sort of like a Blackbrush flower, only bigger and more elegant. The 2^nd cool thing is that it’s a climbing vine, of which there are only a handful native to Northern Utah. Because it’s a climbing vine, it’s not unusual to see these flowers a few feet up off the ground, their vines wound around some small tree or large shrub. This is the 2^nd climbing vine we’ve looked at- the first was Poison Ivy.

Next up is this little fellow; I’ve been seeing it all over the place for weeks but just ID’d it. It’s Ballhead Waterleaf, Hydrophyllum capitatum. The 1^st cool thing about is is that it’s greens and roots are edible, and were regularly collected and consumed by Indians, and later early settlers. (They supposedly require boiling, and no I haven’t tried it yet.) The 2^nd cool thing is that this flower is a favorite pollen and nectar source for one of our native Osmia bee species, making this a perfect spot for a…

Tangent about Pollen, Nectar, Flower Visitantion and Osmia lignaria: Osmia lignaria, commonly known as the Mason Orchard Bee, is one of Utah’s important wild pollinator species. I blogged back in April about the life cycle of Osmia bees in general, but it’s worth taking a closer look at this bee because it highlights the very different flower visitation habits of solitary vs. social bees.

After emerging from her nest as an adult, a female Mason Orchard Bee has between 4 and 8 weeks to live. During this time, she has to mate, find a suitable hole for a nest, and lay roughly 8 eggs in each nest, each with its own compartment and food provisions to nourish the egg through its larval and pupal stages and into adulthood. And she typically does this for an average of 4 separate nests during her short life. (And I thought my summer was busy...)

Nested Tangent: She lays roughly 3 male eggs for every female eggs. (Bees are one of a number of insects- mostly belonging to the order Hymenoptera that can apparently choose the sex of their offspring.) And this brings up the whole subject of sex ratios and why most animals produce equal numbers of male and female offspring, but others don’t, but this fascinating topic is unfortunately beyond the scope of this post, or even this already lengthy tangent.

To provision the roughly 50 eggs she lays during her short life, our heroine needs to collect prodigious helpings of both pollen and nectar. Both are required to grow a healthy bee; pollen is the primary source of protein and nectar is the primary source of carbohydrates.

Now different flowers produce different amounts of pollen and nectar at different times. Social bees, such as honeybees, have workers who specialize in collecting either pollen or nectar, and typically not both. But a solitary bee has no option to divide tasks amongst sisters; she has to gather pollen and nectar for all her brood, And so the collection flights of the Mason Orchard Bee follows a much different course than the typical collection flight of a worker honeybee.

While the honeybee travels repeatedly back and forth to the same type of flower to collect the same thing (pollen or nectar), the Mason Orchard bee visits multiple flower types during the same flight, collecting both pollen and nectar.

Nested Tangent: This is yet another reason I’m partial to Osmia bees- lots of different tasks to do and places to visit in the day, instead of the same-old over and over…

Our 3^rd purple wildflower is really cool. It’s Low Larkspur or Nutall’s Larkspur, Delphinium nuttalianum. There are a number of Larkspur-type species. Their distinctive shape is caused by the top sepal, which juts back horizontally. The 1^st cool thing about Low Larkspur- well I guess the 2^nd, technically, since the shape itself is pretty cool- is that both the sepals and petals are wonderfully colorful, yet very different. The dark outer “petal-looking” leaves are the sepals; when you look “inside” the flower straight on, the real petals are visible- white with delicate purple streaks.

The next cool thing about the Low Larkspur is pollination. Early in the season, it’s most important pollinator is Hummingbirds. But by mid-summer, the Hummingbirds ignore it, and its most important late-season pollinator is queen bumblebees. The reason Hummingbirds only pay it mind early in the season is because in late Spring when the Hummingbirds arrive in breeding season, there aren’t a lot of nectar-rich flowers yet in bloom; the pickings are slim and Low Larkspur looks like a good use of time. But later in the summer, when all sorts of flowers are in bloom, Hummingbirds have a number of nectar-richer flowers to visit instead.

Tangent: Low Larkspur is to Hummingbirds as Oreos are to me. We always keep a pack of Oreos in the house as an “emergency dessert” for our egg-allergic son. (This way when guests bring a “special” dessert, he doesn’t get left out.) I’m not an Oreo fan; if there’s ice cream or real cookies in the house I’ll ignore the Oreos. But if I have the after-dinner munchies, and there’s nothing else around, an Oreo starts to sound not-half-bad.

The 2^nd- or I guess 4^th, so much for consistency in this post- cool thing about Low Larkspur is pretty sinister- it’s poison. Not, apparently, to wild critters, but to livestock big-time. After locoweed, it’s the most poisonous thing to cattle on the Western range. Cattle find Low Larkspur, and several related species of Larkspur- highly palatable and they eat it readily. Unfortunately, all parts of the plant, and especially the seeds and recent growth, contain toxic alkaloids which, in heavy concentrations, are highly poisonous to them.

Chemistry Tangent: Alkaloids are chemical compounds containing nitrogen atoms. There are tons of different alkaloids, and they’re produced by plants, animals and fungi. Many alkaloids have serious pharmacological effects. Examples include caffeine (right), morphine and nicotine.

Nested Chemistry Tangent: My friend Rick, who is- as luck would have it- an organic chemistry professor, looked up the specific alkaloid at work in Low Larkspur. He didn't have a soft-copy diagram for me, but he says it's a monster molecule- multiple rings, tails, and probably 50+ atoms...

The toxicity of Larkspur diminishes as the season progresses, and ranchers generally know to avoid moving their cattle to high meadows (>7,000 ft) before the Larkspur peak has passed, but it’s still a real danger. As recently as 2002, 53 cattle were poisoned in a single incident up in Idaho.

So feel free to boil up some Ballhead Waterleaf greens, but don’t eat any part of anything with a “spurred” flower on it. As for me, I’m getting an Oreo.

Succession in the Foothills, and What Is With All The Rain?

This has been the wettest Spring in the Wasatch I can remember. On the bright side, with a 2-day long exception a couple of weeks ago, the sprinklers are still off, which is a record for us in this house, and the yard is still green and lush. Soon enough it’ll be hot and dry, and then I’ll leave the foothills behind to bike and hike up in the Aspen and Fir, but right now it’s 48F and drizzly. So it’s a good time to catch up on something I wanted to cover before we look at more trees: Succession.

Tangent: This is as good a time as any for my standard rant about rain in Utah. People are always going on about how Utah is a desert, usually in some eco-pretentious (though admittedly correct) tone about how we need to conserve water, tread softly on the land, yada yada… That may well be true, but with the exception of several weeks in the summer, it seems like I am always getting rained on. Steve and I have done 11 Southern Utah backpacking trips over the past decade (8 Dirty Devil area, 1 Escalante, 1 Paria, 1 West Desert) and with the exception of this last one we have been rained or snowed on every single trip. The day of our wedding, June 13, 1998, it rained all day. The day our first son was born, June 6, 1999, it rained on and off all day. This past Memorial Day, it rained all day. Wednesday and most of Thursday this week it rained all day. Seriously, this is a lot of rain. Why isn’t this place greener??

Succession in forestry terms is the process of how a forest or woodland changes over time, and specifically which species success which, and how and when they do so. Over the past century and a half in the West human impacts- logging, chaining, fire suppression- have probably changed the make-up of forests more than anything else, but, but there are natural processes of succession going on all the time in the forests around us.

Way back in the very first post I mentioned that the Wasatch foothills are dominated by only 3 trees, and realistically, only 2 of those 3- Gambel Oak and Bigtooth Maple- comprise probably 99% of foothill woodland or chaparral. (The third hanger-on, Mountain Mahogany, we’ll look at soon.) And what’s interesting about this is that in so much of the West, the forest or woodland is dominated by just 2 or 3 species. Here in the foothills it’s Oak and Maple; up a little higher around 7,000-8,000 feet it’s almost always some combination of Aspen, Douglas Fir and White Fir. In Porter Fork, it’s Douglas Fir and White Fir. Throughout so much of the Southern part of the state or the West Desert, it’s Pinon and Juniper. Down in Red Canyon on the Paunsagunt Plateau there’s a wonderful area around 7,500 – 8,000 feet dominated by a mixed forest of Bristlecone and Limber Pine. Where I used to live and mtn bike in Colorado, in the foothills West of Denver, it was Ponderosa and Lodgepole Pine.

This 2 or 3 tree-type forest is a big contrast to where I grew up in the Northeast, where forests always seemed to be a confusing jumble of different species, and it makes it easier to pay attention to succession. In every one of the forests types I rattled off above, some type of ongoing successional change is occurring.

In the Wasatch Foothills, 2 big changes are occurring. The first is man-made. Suppression of both fire and grazing is causing an expansion of the Oak/Maple woodland/chaparral. Historically regular grass fires burned back new young seedlings and clones, and more recently grazing chomped young new shoots.

The 2^nd change is the ongoing invasion of Gambel Oak stands by Bigtooth Maple. The 2 trees have much in common, but the differences favor Maple in the long term.

Gambel Oak is more sun and drought tolerant and is usually first to pioneer dry, open hillsides. Bigtooth Maple does better initially in cooler, shadier, wetter areas, and initially colonizes drainages and slope bases. But over time, the Maple expands out of these “secure” footholds and slowly invades, mixes with, and eventually eclipses Gambel Oak. It does so for several reasons.

First, the ground under a stand of Gambel Oak is typically freer of shrubs and low vegetation than the ground under a stand of Big Tooth Maple. A Maple samara that find its way to the ground in an Oak stand has a much greater chance of landing in a patch of soil where it can take root than does an acorn deposited on the ground in a stand of Maple.

Second is the greater shade tolerance of Maple. A samara that does come to rest in an Oak stand has a much greater chance of developing into a young sapling than does the acorn under the Maples. In the first case the shade of the Oaks makes the growth of the Maple possible, while in the second the shade of the Maples inhibits the successful growth of the Oak.

Third is timing: Bigtooth Maple- as we’ve seen this Spring- flowers and seeds way earlier in the year than Gambel Oak.

Fourth is rate of Growth: Over the course of the growing season, Bigtooth Maple grows faster in both stem and crown than Gamble Oak.

And fifth is seeding. Maples of all kinds, blow away the Oaks of all kinds in terms of sheer numbers of seeds produced. And although here in the Wasatch the vast majority of reproduction and expansion for both species is asexual (stem-layering for Maple, root-cloning for Oak) the sheer numerical advantage in seeds give Maple a higher cumulative shot at inserting seeds into Oak stands than vice versa.

The cooler, higher, shadier, or more North-facing the site is, the likelier and more successful Maple succession will be. But there’s a delicate balance: if the site is too cool, moist or shady, the canopy of the Maples will in turn enable invasion by other shade and cold-tolerant trees, such as White Fir and Douglas Fir. The higher up you go, the more likely becomes this type of multi-stage succession. Over centuries or even just decades, the successional processes can lead to significant changes in the composition and character of mountain forests.

And when we start to look at time frames of a few thousands of years, the changes get even more dramatic, as we’ve already seen with relic Ponderosas, Joshua Trees and Creosote, and as we’ll see shortly in our our back yard of the Wasatch with hybrid Oaks. But first let’s turn our attention to that 3^rd tree of the foothills, the one that just about everyone ignores: Mountain Mahogany.

Tangent: So how about this bitchin’ new logo? Is this sharp looking or what? Makes me want to put it on a T-shirt or a bumper-sticker or something…I’m particularly proud of it because of my absolutely dismal lack of artistic ability. Which is really sad when you think of what an amazing artist my Dad is. Guess in this case the apple fell far from the tree… like it rolled down a ravine, fell into a river and was carried out to sea or something.

Extra-whimsical-tangent: While I’ve been typing this the rain’s stopped, sun is poking out of the clouds. Looks like my rant worked…

3 New Mountain Wildflowers

Some catch-up on wildflowers today. I’ve resigned myself to never being able to blog about all of them I come across, but I’ll highlight 3 today I’ve come across over the last week in the Wasatch between 6,000 and 8,000 feet.

This guy (pic right) is Richardson’s Geranium, Geranium richardsonii. (OK this has to be the easiest name in all of botany.) It’s the most common wild geranium in the West, occurring from way up in the Yukon down into Northern Mexico, but never further East than South Dakota. There are over 400 species of Geranium in the world, over 40 of which grow wild in North America, but of those 40 only around half are native. Geraniums are shade tolerant, and typically grow on forest floors, such as in an Aspen forest, which is where I found these (pic left). They reproduce either by seed- and are pollinated by bees and flower beetles- or asexually by root-cloning, like Gambel Oak or Creosote.

Tangent: You know all those plants that people grow in their gardens called “geraniums”? (pic right, from my back deck) They’re not Geranium species. They’re all various species of a related genus called Pelargonium. The vast majority of cultivated garden “geraniums” are derived from one of a dozen or species of Pelargonium, all of which are native to Africa, and all but one of which are native specifically to South Africa.

The wild geranium I haven’t yet come across, but am keeping an eye out for, is the Sticky Geranium, Geranium viscosissum, (pic left) which is most common in the Northwest, but supposedly makes it down into Utah. What’s interesting about this guy is there’s some preliminary evidence that seems to indicate it’s paracarnivorous, which means that while not directly carnivorous- like a Venus Flytrap- it’s able to break down and possibly benefit from animal proteins. The trichomes, or little surface hairs on the stems/leaves of Sticky Geranium have protease enzymes on them, which are the type of enzymes that break down protein molecules. The idea is that the Sticky Geranium might be able to metabolize nutrients from surface microbes or teeny bugs that wind up stuck/dead on its leaves/stems.

Tangent: Some botanists use the term protocarnivorous, because it’s thought that maybe behaviors and processes like this are how true carnivorous plants evolved, but the term is technically a stretch, because it implies a direction in evolution toward carnivory (yes that’s a word) when it’s not clear that’s the case. In fact, there are a number of examples of plants that appear to have had carnivorous behavior in their evolutionary past, but are today non-carnivorous.

Yellow Fritillary, Fritallaria pudica, also called Yellowbell, are easy to identity, and always hang upside down. Like Richardson’s Geranium, they grow all over the West. They bear a resemblance to Glacier Lilies, and like Glacier Lilies are short-lived, pop up soon after snow-melt, and do well in open woodlands. They’re also members of the Lily family, Liliaceae, and therefore are also monocots. And- also like Glacier Lilies- they have an edible corm, or bulb, growing 3-6” below ground.

There are around 100 Fritallia species across the Northern hemisphere. They reproduce either by seed, or asexually via bulbets, (Yes, yet another mechanism by which plants can reproduce solo...) which are basically smaller bulbs that grow off the main bulb.

This last flower is probably the prettiest and most interesting. It’s Utah Sweetpea, Lathyrus pauciflorus Fernald (pic left).

There are 160 species of Lathyrus, all “sweetpeas” or “vetchlings”, 30 of which are native to North America. Sweet peas do produce pea-like seeds, but they contain a poisonous neurotoxin. (So like, don’t eat them. There’s actually a name for the sickness- sweat pea lathyrism- you get when you do eat them, so apparently this must happen with some regularity.) 2 European sweetpeas, Lathyrus odoratus and Lathyrus latifolius, have been cultivated for centuries and have played an important role in the foundations of modern genetics. I’ve included a photo of L. latifolius (pic right) so you can see how similar it appears to L. paucifloris.

You probably never heard of Reginald Punnett, but he’s one of the guys who continued Gregor Mendel’s work. He developed this chart, the Punnett Square, which you may have seen back in biology class, and is used to predict the probability of different inherited traits.

He did most of his work with sweetpeas. His classic experiment was producing a blue-flowered sweatpea from 2 white-flowered parents, showing that each carried the recessive blue gene, similar to how 2 brown-eyed human parents can produce a blue-eyed offspring.

Sweetpeas have been bred and cultivated into almost every color, but never yellow. A yellow sweetpea appears to be an impossibility; no Lathyrus species carries genes for yellow pigment. And in this respect, they’re a wonderful converse analog to the long-sought blue rose. For centuries gardeners have attempted to breed a true blue rose, without successs. (The few you see are simply dyed.) But roses carry no genes for blue pigment, and both sweetpeas and roses are interesting examples of the limits of cultivation; gardeners can come up with amazing flowers, but they’re ultimately constrained by the set of genes they have to work with. (For a cool, geeky sysnopsis on recent attempts to genetically engineer a blue rose, check out this article.)

4 Cool Things about the Black-headed Grosbeak

Here’s lousy photo and a cool bird.

Tangent: As we have discussed previously, I am a lousy wildlife photographer. So I have supplemented my lame, partially obscured, blurry photo (left), with this clear crisp one I pulled off the web (right)

A (Semi) Spirited Defense of My Lame Wildlife Photos

It should be noted that most of the time I take a wildlife photo, it’s not like I’m sitting out there quietly for 4 hours with a folding chair and a tripod; I’m mtn biking shortly before or after dawn, usually going fairly hard, with my heart up above 140BPM or so. I see the creature, stop pedaling, brake to a stop, and pull out my camera, which I keep in the rear left pocket of my bike jersey (Biking jerseys have 3 pockets across the back on the bottom, where cyclists keep things they want to have handy- tubes, gels, etc.) The camera itself I keep in a padded case, which opens quickly, but it’s still another step. So most often, whatever I am trying to photograph has run, flown or slithered a fiar distance away before I get my shot.

For example, this morning I surprised a herd of about 8 elk up in Pinebrook, including 2 magnificent bulls. But by the time I snapped a photo, here’s what I got. Yes, there is an elk there… inside the red circle… (pic right)

Back to the Bird

But lame as my photo was, it was still good enough for Wonder Boy to ID the bird.

Tangent: “Wonder Boy” is how I will now refer to my 8-year old, whom I’ve profiled previously as canyoneer, dirty fighter, and peanutbutter-dispersal-agent. He is also a completely obsessive wildlife nut who memorizes animal and bird identification guides. When my wife and I see an interesting bird at the backyard feeder, we call Wonder Boy, who comes running over, and 9 out of 10 times IDs the bird immediately, without consulting a guidebook.

The bird is a male Black-headed Grosbeak., Pheucticus melanocephalus, a fairly common songbird of the American West, that winters down in Mexico and summers/breeds in the Western US and Southwestern Canada. The male’s song is like a faster, slightly more appealing (described at “sweeter” in one source) version of a Robin’s song. They’re usually found in open woodlands and seem to avoid coniferous forests.

Grosbeaks are seed-eating songbirds with large beaks. As a group they are polyphyletic. Yesterday when we looked at Balsamroots and Mule’s Ears we talked about the difference between a monophyletic and a paraphyletic grouping. A polyphyletic grouping is looser still than a paraphyletic grouping, in that the traits its members share have evolved separately and independently. A (rather lame) example in the human world might be a bowling league; the members all bowl, but they’re not (necessarily) related, and they (probably) all learned to bowl independently. (Ow, that is a really lame analogy...)

Many Grosbeaks, including the Black-headed Grosbeak, are members of the Cardinal Family, Cardinalidae, but many others are member of the Finch family, Fringillidae, and 2 species seem to be members of the Tanager family, Thraupidae. Pheucticus, a genus within the Cardinal family, includes 6 Grosbeaks, all native to the Western hemisphere, 3 of which can be found in the continental US.

4 Cool Things about the Black-headed Grosbeak

First, it breaks a common “rule” in songbird behavior. Typically in species in which the male has bright, showy plumage, the male does not assist or participate in incubating the eggs. A rare exception is the male Black-headed Grosbeak, who takes on an equal share of the incubation duties (it’s not all Alan Alda though- he partners with a new mate every year.) And interestingly, the colorful plumage of the male doesn’t extend to the head, so that when he is incubating the eggs, only his camo-friendly brown feathers are visible.

Second, the Black-headed Grosbeak is one of the few birds that can happily eat Monarch Butterflies without difficulty or negative after-effects.

Details: Monarch butterflies are conspicuous and slow, clumsy fliers.Their only real defense against predators is that they're poisonous and terrible-tasting. They do this through the presence of a type of steroids in their bodies called cardenolides, (diagram left) which they obtain by eating milkweed. Apparently the Black-Headed Grosbeak has evolved an immunity to the cardenolides in Monarchs (and may therefore play a small but welcomed role in reducing the number that eventually wind up on my windshield.)

Even More Detail: So this same evolution-of-immunity to cardenolides was also achieved by the Monarchs themselves. Milkweeds, or more specifically the 140 species of plants that comprise the genus Asclepius, are experts in chemical defense, producing cardenolides and several other nasty compounds, and providing a valuable food source for the fair number of butterflies, moths and beetles who've evolved the necessary immunities. Cool Corollary: In other words, the Monarch has had its own evolutionary trick pulled on him by the Black-headed Grosbeak.

Third, the females (pic right) also sing. In general, the female song is usually a simpler version of the male song. But once in a while, a female will sing a complete, full male song. Ornithologists suspect that this behavior is intended to trick her mate into thinking another male is courting his mate and encourage him to spend more time around the nest. (I swear I have a friend that has this exact same thing going on with his wife…)

Fourth, the Black-headed Grosbeak is closely-related to the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Pheucticus ludovicianus, (pic left) which winters further South in Central America and summers/breeds in the Eastern and Central US and Canada. Where Rose-breasted and Black-headed Grosbeaks overlap they often hybridize, and if this story sounds familiar that’s because it’s exactly the same story I told about the Lazuli Bunting & Indigo Bunting, which in turn was pretty much exactly the same story I told about the Stellers Jay & Blue Jay. In each case a Western bird and a closely-related Eastern version of that bird occasionally bump into each other and readily hybridize. In fact, it’s questionable with these 3 pairs: Black-headed/Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Lazuli/Indigo Bunting and Stellers/Blue Jay are really different species, or are in fact conspecific, which means that they’re just different versions or subspecies of the same species.

The reason this East-West division seems to be so common is the Great Plains. For millions of years, the Great Plains has acted as a barrier to these woodland/forest-dwelling birds, and the separation it has enforce has started each of these pairs on a path toward speciation. But over the last 150 or so years, towns have sprouted up across the Great Plains. Settlers planted trees in their towns, and these towns have developed into little “woodland islands” which have enabled the migration of these birds East or West across the former prairie and brought them into contact once again with their old cousins, leading toward hybridization and therefore potentially away from continued speciation.

These 3 pairs of birds- Black-headed/Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Lazuli/Indigo Bunting, and Steller/Blue Jay are fascinating because not only do they each give us a glimpse of evolution and speciation midstream, but because they also highlight how human activity can and does alter or even reverse that process.