Drinking Water!

Photo: FLLT

Where does your drinking water come from?

If you live or work in the City of Ithaca, your drinking water comes from beautiful Six Mile Creek.  The Finger Lakes Land Trust has recently undertaken the Six Mile Creek Protection Project to permanently secure 12,000 feet of shoreline on land that connects to the Roy H. Park Preserve, Hammond Hill State Forest, and other conserved lands.

Where does YOUR drinking water come from?

Did you know that the 11 Finger Lakes provide drinking water for over 1 million people?

Did you know that there are persistent and documented threats to drinking water quality in the Finger Lakes region?

Learn more about drinking water and how we can protect it in our regional conservation agenda, Lakes, Farms, and Forests Forever.

 

Watch more nature videos on the Land Trust web site!

Go to fllt.org/video

Hollow Snow

Photo: FLLT

Watch more nature videos on the Land Trust web site!

Go to fllt.org/video

Natural History 2

Photo: Bill Hecht

See also Part 1 and Part 3

Natural History of the Finger Lakes, Part 2: Glaciers

Perceived by people as interminably slow, glaciers are in geologic time fast-moving, landscape-altering mechanisms.

They are the second most prominent force that shaped our landscape and arguably the most visible one today.  The ancient sea, that literally created the rocks which comprise the landscape, is the most dominate; but its influence is not nearly as “visible” as the steep-sided hills, stunning waterfalls, dramatic gorges, and long sinuous lakes created by the glaciers.

Human influence on the landscape could also arguably be said to be most visible, the presence of roads, power lines, and suburban sprawl are nearly everywhere.  However, our influence is within the confines of what the glaciers left.  We have not rolled back or altered what glaciers have done, but rather adapted to and built around what the immense sheets of ice both removed and left behind.

Laurentide Ice Sheet

The most recent ice age — there have been five in the earth’s 4.5 billion year history — occurred between 110,000 and 11,700 years ago.  During that time, a miles-thick sheet of ice, known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, expanded and spread from central Canada.  The advance of the massive ice sheet was not one continuous surge, but rather a series of advances, halts, and retreats.

Ancient in genesis and long evolving, the landscape today is a primeval seabed, uplifted, slowly eroded, and then dramatically carved and scoured by miles thick sheets of ice.

How many times the ice retreated and advanced is not known exactly; each successive advance effectively scrubbed away most of the evidence of the preceding advance.  But there is evidence of their passage and it is found throughout the region if you know what to look for.

Photo: Nigel Kent
Robert Treman State Park. Photo: Nigel Kent

One interesting example of the successive glaciers is the juxtaposition of the “Old Gorge” and “New Gorge” at Robert H. Treman State Park, aka Enfield Glen.  During a period of interglacial retreat, a gorge formed in Enfield Glen.  But when the glacier advanced yet again, it filled in that gorge with glacial till.

After the last glacier retreated, the gorge began to reform.  Instead of cutting through the layers of an ancient seabed, the waters of Enfield Creek encountered the loose glacial till and quickly it swept away. Today, the lower gorge is relatively flat and broad while the upper gorge is similar to other gorges in the region. The separation of the two is demarcated by Lucifer Falls, one of the most dramatic waterfalls in the region.

Terminal moraines and northward drainage

Before the glaciers reshaped the region, the predominate drainage system was southward into the Chesapeake Bay watershed.  Today the majority of the region’s water flows northward into the Great Lakes.  The reversal has widespread effects and the change is hinted at by what are called hooked tributaries.

Typically, a network of tributary streams and rivers meet at v-shaped forks that indicate the direction of flow. When water flows into the point of the fork or doubles back after reaching the main branch, it often indicates that the original course has been redirected.  Keuka Lake, sometimes called “Crooked Lake,” is the most visible example of this reverse flow.  The northern bays of the lake meet at a juncture that points south, but the water flows from south to north.  The reversal of the watershed is the after-effect of large deposits of scoured material deposited at the leading edge of the glaciers.

Keuka Lake. Photo: Bill Hecht
Keuka Lake. Photo: Bill Hecht

Referred to as a terminal moraine, these deposits effectively dammed the old drainage pattern.  The terminal moraine is essentially the apex of one glacial advance and/or indicative of a major halting point during the ebb and flow of the ice.  (Note that the most striking example of the deposits at a terminal moraine is Long Island, which was entirely created from glacial deposits.)

The terminal moraine of the last Laurentide glacier in the Finger Lakes region is a broad sweeping arc that encompasses the Finger Lakes watersheds.  It effectively fills the lakes with water that would otherwise flow south into the Chesapeake Bay; instead, it flows through the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean.

This long route has obvious implications on how the natural system interconnects, but would also influence how the continent would be settled by European colonists.  Waterways were the traditional path of least resistance so colonists followed these routes rather than the shorter, more direct overland routes.

Retreating ice, deeper lakes, hanging valleys

Another interesting effect of the terminal moraine occurred as the ice retreated.  With the normal drainage pattern blocked and a thick sheet of ice behind, the water coming off the glacier became trapped.  The result was that the Finger Lakes were far larger and deeper than today.

Look up to the top of the hillsides encompassing the lakes and imagine the vast glacial lakes that existed then. Streams feed into these immense lakes but when the ice retreated and the lake levels lowered, they would leave behind “hanging valleys.”  Staggeringly high waterfalls resulted, of which Taughannock Falls is the most impressive.  Over the following millennia, the waterfall and creek have cut a wide gorge (perhaps more accurately described as a canyon) back into the hillside effectively moving the hanging valley westward.

15-Taughannock aerial-5-04.Bill Hecht
Taughannock Falls. Photo: Bill Hecht

The waterfall and creek were able to alter the landscape so dramatically due to the layers of easily erodible shale and more erosion resistant sandstone (See Natural History, Part 1).  The plunging waterfall washed away the many layers of shale so that the sandstone layers were undercut and broke off, moving the crest of the falls westward only to begin the process again.

Massive chunks, sometimes as big as a house are known to cleave off (note this is why you want to stay away from the base of these falls).  The rubble is eventually pushed through the gorge into the delta on Cayuga Lake and is presently where Taughannock Falls State Park beach and marina are today.

Pothole lakes, kettle and kame

Another effect of a halting glacier is pothole lakes.  Pothole lakes are deep, round lakes that were scoured out by the torrential waterfalls that formed on the leading edge of a glacier.  Round and Green lakes in Green Lakes State Park, as well as Glacier Lake at nearby Clark Reservation, are striking examples of this phenomenon.  Imagine the waterfall that scoops out the 150-foot high gorge and 195-foot deep lake at Green Lake and you may begin to visualize the immensity of the ice sheets.

To see this process in microcosm visit Buttermilk Falls State Park, where the emerald green potholes underwent and continue to undergo a similar process.  Viewed from above, the close proximity of Round and Green Lakes indicate two successional halts in the final retreat of the ice sheets; successive advances would have filled in the potholes with glacial till. Examples of successive potholes from retreating waterfalls can be seen in the ribbon -like creek bed in the Spiral Gorge section of Watkins Glen State Park.

Another indication of the glacier’s passage is the fact that the bottom of two Finger Lakes are actually below sea level — 53 feet below at Cayuga Lake and 173 feet below at Seneca Lake.  Erosion proceeds indefinitely upon the landscape until the surface equals the level of the sea/ocean.  For a lake to extend below sea level in a region over two hundred miles from the ocean indicates immense land-altering forces.

Buttermilk Falls State Park. Photo: Tom Reimers
Buttermilk Falls State Park. Photo: Tom Reimers

How such an oddity exists is part of the visible effects of glaciers on the region — U-shaped valleys. Streams and rivers create V-shaped valleys, but throughout central New York are broad U-shaped valleys that lack a stream or river which would account for the broad gulf between the steep-sided hills.  People from the region may see this as normal but in other parts of the country (or world), U-shaped valleys are not the norm by any means.  Before the glaciers advanced, the region was basically a level plain dissected by streams and rivers that cut the V-shaped valleys.  When the glaciers advanced, they scoured out these valleys, broadened their bases, and steepened the sides.

There are many topological features that resulted from retreating glaciers as well.  Debris often accumulated in depressions within the ice.  Additionally, large chunks of ice often calved off and were covered by and surrounded by similar debris.  When the glaciers melted, the accumulated debris would form highly stratified mounds, known as kames, while the buried blocks of ice left behind created deep depressions, known as kettles.  The two landforms often coincide and are referred to as kettle and kame topography.  Examples of this can be found at Lime Hollow Nature Center and Lindsay-Parsons Biodiversity Preserve.

After effects continue

And the after effects of the glaciers are still not over.  It is helpful to remember that the surface crust of the earth is actually “floating” atop a more fluid layer beneath.  What happens to a floating object once a massive amount of weight is removed?  It rises — and that is precisely what is happening to the previously weighted down portions of North America.  The rebounding will take millennia but once complete it is predicted to change the topography so much that Niagara Falls will actual reverse its course.

Clearly, glaciers dramatically altered the landscape and are part of what makes the region so unique. Without them, the landscape would more closely resemble that of the Plains states.  It’s important to remember that many of these effects were compounded by the preceding major geological phase — New York as an inland sea —  which lasted hundreds of millions of years.  The glaciers altered the landscape in less than a tenth of a million years while the next phase has occurred in less than 1% of the glaciers’ time — the effects of human development.

See Natural History, Part 3

Author Tim Starmer provided this natural history series for Go Finger Lakes in addition to writing 50 of the location descriptions.  You can read more in his book 5-Star Trails: Finger Lakes and Central New York (Menasha Ridge Press).

From natural history to a natural future… help us save land forever.

Join the Land Trust

Snapping Turtle

Photo: Carol Heesen/Shutterstock.com

Animals and Plants of the Finger Lakes

Handle with Care: Snapping Turtles!

With its long, spiny tail, muscular legs, long claws, and low, flattened carapace, the common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) looks ponderous and primitive, rather like an iguana trying to hide beneath a snow saucer.

Although not nearly as daunting as its much larger southern cousin, the alligator snapping turtle, it’s no slouch, either: it can reach 35-45 pounds, with a shell over a foot long; exceptional individuals may grow even larger.

The snapping turtle appears prehistoric because it is.  The genus Chelyridae evolved in North America 90 million years ago, and modern specimens look very little different from their ancestors.  While giant marine reptiles swam in the shallow sea that covered much of North America and the Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops squared off on land, chelydrids hunkered down in the mud.

They survived the meteor impact 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs and have weathered countless natural and man-made disasters.  These tough reptiles can eat almost anything and live almost anywhere, including polluted bodies of water with low oxygen levels, and even sewer systems.  Although they are the official state reptile of New York, they are found everywhere from southern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, from the east coast to the Rockies.

Photo: Lang Elliot
Photo: Lang Elliott

The snapper’s scientific name means “snake-like turtle,” a reference to its very long, agile neck, which it can whip out with unnerving speed to grab prey items or warn off would-be predators.  Apart from its rather unpredictable business end, however, the animal is very sedentary.  It prefers to spend its days hidden by mud and algae at the bottom of shallow, still or slow-moving, bodies of water.  Every now and then, it will lift its long neck to the surface to take a sip of air.  When it needs to get around, it usually walks or bounces along the bottom rather than swimming.

The majority of its diet is made up of plants and slow-moving fish, but it will also eat carrion, invertebrates, amphibians, and anything else that happens to float by.  Its reputation for taking game fish or waterfowl is undeserved, however; although it will snatch a duckling if it gets the chance, in general, it is simply too slow to catch healthy, fast-moving animals.

snapping turtle
Photo: Carol Heesen/Shutterstock.com 

In the water, the snapping turtle is surprisingly unsnappish and will flee rather than retaliate, even when stepped on.  However, it is usually cantankerous on land, perhaps because it feels vulnerable: unlike many other turtles, it cannot pull its head and legs into its shell.  Snappers are most likely to be ashore in the summer; between late May and early July, the females search for nest sites, and animals of both sexes sometimes bask on sun-warmed asphalt.  The jury is out as to whether a snapping turtle can actually snap off a finger, but it can undoubtedly do a lot of damage with its sharp beak.  If you find one on land, it is wisest to leave it alone.  If you must pick it up, hold its back end firmly, keeping your hands as far away from the head as possible; never pick one up by its tail.

Snappers live a very long time, mature very late, and lay a relatively small number of eggs per year.  This strategy helps the species survive an unpredictable environment in which harsh weather and heavy predation kill almost all turtles before they reach breeding age.  Unfortunately, it also means that populations can be devastated by the loss of adult animals.  Many turtles, especially females looking for nest sites, are struck and killed by cars.  In addition, the demand for turtle meat has increased in recent years and in some areas of the country — though not yet in the Finger Lakes — populations of snapping turtles have dropped precipitously; once again, gravid females are the most vulnerable because they are the most mobile.  The turtles have the last laugh, however: since they are at the top of the food chain and live a long time in nutrient-rich waters, their flesh is often heavily contaminated with toxins.

The populations of many other native turtles are in steep decline, but snappers generally seem to be holding their own.  If the past is any guide, they’ll probably still be here long after we’re gone.

This story by Jacqueline Stuhmiller first appeared in our newsletter, The Land Steward, as part of the Closer Look series about plants and animals of the Finger Lakes region.

Want to know more about animals and plants of the Finger Lakes?

Take a closer look!

Forest on the FLX

Photo: FLLT

Early Spring Visit to a Forest on the Finger Lakes Trail

Owned by the Finger Lakes Trail Conference and protected by a conservation easement with the Finger Lakes Land Trust, the Bock-Harvey Forest Preserve features a portion of the Finger Lakes Trail, a mix of forest and fields, and proximity to other conserved lands.  Enjoy this short video from an early spring day when snowmelt had the small creek running through beautiful ice formations.

To find other outdoor adventures near the Bock-Harvey Forest Preserve, see the interactive map.

Do you have great videos or photos of nature in the Finger Lakes?  Want to share with the Land Trust?  If so, please email us at gofingerlakes@fllt.org.

Watch more nature videos on the Land Trust web site!

Go to fllt.org/video

Honey Bee

Photo: Pete Wiedmann

Animals and Plants of the Finger Lakes

The Honey Bee: Our Friend in Danger

In 2006, American beekeepers began noticing that their charges were mysteriously disappearing from one hive after another.

The losses didn’t stop the next year, or the next, and although the catastrophic declines have recently abated a bit, no one knows why the bees are dying or how to save them.  Experts have warned that colony collapse disorder (CCD), as the phenomenon has been dubbed, could imperil our food production systems: a full one-third of the agricultural crops in the U. S. are pollinated by bees.

The little insect that shoulders most of this responsibility is the European honey bee (Apis mellifera). This relatively sleek, orange-and-black-striped, highly social animal is what we usually think of as a “bee,” and it produces the fragrant honeys and beeswax found in our markets.  Like most Americans, the European honey bee is a naturalized species, having arrived on this continent with the first European colonists.

Photo: Zachary Huang
Photo: Zachary Huang

Humans have lived side-by-side with honey bees for a very long time and have bred them for certain desirable characteristics.  However, a bee can never be entirely domesticated.  The apiarist can encourage his bees to stay in a man-made hive, but there is nothing to prevent them from swarming, the process by which a colony splits in two; if swarming bees are not coaxed into a new hive, they will find another cavity –– a hollow tree, an empty barn –– in which to nest.  In addition, the close proximity of domesticated and feral bee populations means that there is always some gene flow back and forth. There are over a hundred native bee species in the Finger Lakes, but they do not live in large colonies or produce significant amounts of either honey or wax.

Exotic species can have disruptive or even devastating impacts on native ecosystems, but honey bees do not seem to negatively affect native pollinators; if anything, the presence of so many additional bees has increased the reproductive capacities of many plants.  Plants fiercely compete for attention by producing colorful, nectar-filled flowers; their success, however, is always limited by the number of pollinators available to take the bait.  Although small fields surrounded by natural areas may be serviced entirely by native insects, modern large-scale farming often involves growing vast fields of single-species crops in landscapes that cannot support large populations of wild pollinators.  Consequently, hives are trucked around the country on a regular schedule in order to pollinate crops as they come into bloom.

The hard-working, peripatetic insects that ensure our food supply are particularly susceptible to the recent bee plague.  CCD seems to be caused not by a single factor but by a perfect storm of stressors that weaken a colony past the tipping point: fungal, bacterial, and viral pathogens; pesticides; stresses associated with migratory beekeeping; malnutrition (a particular problem for bees that feed on monocultures); and parasites.  In particular, the Asian mite Varroa destructor is very often associated with colony collapse.  Because beekeepers control mite infestations, bees never get a chance to evolve resistance to the parasites.  In addition, colonies are crowded into apiaries, combs and broods are regularly transferred between colonies, and bees are discouraged from swarming, all of which favor the spread of mites.

If Varroa mites have wreaked havoc on beekeepers’ hives, they have had an even more devastating effect on feral honey bees: some experts estimate that there are almost no wild-living colonies left in the U.S. However, in at least one place in New York, feral bees are doing surprisingly well.  In Cornell’s Arnot Forest, Schuyler County, the bees are going about their business as they have for the last four hundred years.  In fact, the forest contains at least as many feral honey bee nests today as it did thirty years ago, despite the fact that the bees are as heavily infested with mites as are their hive-dwelling cousins.  The reasons for their success are still unclear.  The bees may have developed biological resistance or behaviors that reduce mite populations, such as more frequent grooming.  Perhaps the mites’ strategies have evolved, as well, and they are learning to live more peacefully with their hosts.  Then, too, perhaps swarming acts as a natural sort of mite control: feral bees are free to swarm whenever they please, and each swarm reduces the mite population in the original colony.  Much more research remains to be done on this subject, but it is comforting to realize that at least part of the solution to the bee die-off that threatens our national agricultural security just might be found in the wild spaces of upstate New York.

This story by Jacqueline Stuhmiller first appeared in our newsletter, The Land Steward, as part of the Closer Look series about plants and animals of the Finger Lakes region.

Want to know more about animals and plants of the Finger Lakes?

Take a closer look!

Natural History 3

Photo: Steve Gallow

See also Part 1 and Part 2

Natural History of the Finger Lakes Region, Part 3: Humans

First the ancient seabed, then the glaciers, and most recently, the physical transformation of the regional landscape by people

The present landscape of the Finger Lakes and Central New York has been molded by three major phases.  The first was the formation of the underlying rocks when New York was part of a vast inland sea.  The second phase was a protracted period of reshaping of those rocks by immense glaciers.  And the third phase was the physical transformation of the landscape during and following the industrial revolution.

Remarkable influence of the Erie Canal

Looking at the landscape today, it is hard to believe that a little more than two hundred years ago this landscape was considered wilderness.  After the Revolutionary War, veterans were given military plots to encourage settlement. But the region was vast and development came at a trickle due to the difficulty of transporting goods and materials over land from the cities along the east coast.

The burgeoning colonies were stifled in their westward expansion by the sprawling Appalachian Mountains. The expansion that did occur was tied to the waterways, namely the Hudson and Saint Lawrence Rivers and the Great Lakes –a  circuitous route to reach the interior.  Soon came the idea to create a new waterway: the Erie Canal. Other states also sought to blaze a path to the west but New York and its unique topography are what gave it an edge and helped contribute to its ultimate success.

Montezuma NWR. Photo: Bill Hecht
Montezuma NWR. Photo: Bill Hecht

Where the canal went, populations boomed and spread to the surrounding countryside.  It is no coincidence that the major population centers of Upstate New York are found along I-90 which follows the canal.  The canal literally connected the region, but the goods and travelers that floated through also bolstered the expansion of the nation as a whole.  New York City, which acted as the port of call for goods that flowed east, grew exponentially and many believe that without the canal, the city would have seen growth more akin to Boston or even smaller cities along the Atlantic seaboard.  Immigration accounted for much of the nation’s growth at the time, and New York soon became the most populous state in the union.

Nearly 80% of upstate New York’s population lives within 25 miles of the canal.  And where population grows so does development.

Clinton’s ditch, as the canal was disparagingly called, was a massive undertaking and required extensive work to bypass some natural features.  None was greater than the effort to pass through the Montezuma Swamp where it was rumored that over a thousand people died of malaria during the construction.  The construction of the canal required more than just ditch digging and lock construction.  In order to ensure reliable water levels, a vast network of lakes and newly constructed reservoirs were interconnected to feed the canal.  These reservoirs dot the landscape and make up many of the lake communities situated on water bodies other than the actual Finger Lakes.

Keuka Outlet. Photo: Steve Knapp
Keuka Outlet. Photo: Steve Knapp

The cost of constructing the canal is estimated to have been 7 million dollars.  An unheard-of sum for a public works project in the 19th century, but perhaps even more astonishing is that the initial investment was recouped within the first nine years of operation.  The success of the canal inspired other communities to build their own, resulting in the Cayuga-Seneca Canal, Keuka Outlet, and the Chemung Canal in Watkins Glen.  These branch canals were constructed to connect the Finger Lakes communities and as such, saw increased commerce and growth.  Nearly 80% of Upstate New York’s population lives within 25 miles of the canal, and where population grows so does development.

Railways to highways

When the canals gave way to railroads, the railways were built on or beside the infrastructure of the canals. In time, sections of the Erie Canal were simply filled in or built over and as a result, the influence the canal had on the region is often overlooked.  But much as the glaciers shaped the landscape, the canal ultimately laid the seeds where communities would grow for the next century.

Today, we are more likely to note the effects of suburban sprawl on the landscape, but sprawl does not develop on its own.  A center must be present first, and as is usual in the course of history, the center is related to waterways.  The lakes, rivers and canals were/are the centers from which the Central New York and Finger Lakes communities grow.  And yet paradoxically, the focus around these water bodies actually endangers both the natural resources and the surrounding populations.

Therein lies one of the great benefits of conservation efforts.  Even if you never set foot along a trail or dip a paddle into protected waters, the forests and other preserved lands purify your water, clean your air, mitigate flooding and dampen the effects of major storms.

Over-population and pollution threaten the very source of what led to growth and our modern societies are fraught with ever more complex problems.  Chemicals, pesticides, and other pollutants (some with half-lives that will persist beyond the length of recorded human history) have a growing ability to damage our region’s bountiful water resources.

This is not simply a cautionary tale as Upstate New Yorkers need look no further than the legacy of Onondaga Lake.  Industrial pollutants and persistent PCBs effectively made Onondaga a dead lake.  In decades past, it was unsafe to merely come into contact with its water, let alone to drink or utilize it for any purpose.  Thankfully, the lake is being cleaned and restored but its history is a dire warning that water is a fragile resource that can be easily spoiled.  The cleanup is often far more costly and drastic than an ounce of prevention.

Therein lies one of the great benefits of conservation efforts.  Even if you never set foot along a trail or dip a paddle into protected waters, the forests and other preserved lands purify your water, clean your air, mitigate flooding and dampen the effects of major storms.  The wildlife habitat preserved will ensure sustainable levels of wildlife for sportsman, bolster wildlife viewing throughout the region, and even act as natural control over pests like mosquitoes and invasive species.  These effects are not just local but regional and global.

See Natural History, Part 1

Author Tim Starmer provided this natural history series for Go Finger Lakes in addition to writing 50 of the location descriptions.  You can read more in his book 5-Star Trails: Finger Lakes and Central New York (Menasha Ridge Press).

From natural history to a natural future… help us save land forever.

Join the Land Trust

Chickadee

Photo: Marie Read

Animals and Plants of the Finger Lakes

Winter for Black-capped Chickadees

On the harshest winter mornings, when the air is so cold and dry that it freezes the inside of your nostrils with every breath, the silence of the snow seems almost too loud to bear.

If you listen hard, one of the first things you’re likely to hear are thin, squeaking calls announcing the presence of a flock of Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus).  How does this bird, so tiny that it could hide in your cupped hand, survive the subzero temperatures and fierce winter winds of the Finger Lakes?  The answer: just barely.

Most birds escape cold weather by migrating to the tropics, but these journeys are dangerous and energy-intensive.  The chickadee instead lives here year-round, a strategy that is not without its own perils.  The calculus of winter is harsh: in order to stay alive, an animal must either produce a lot more heat or lose a lot less of it.  However, food is hard to find in the winter and there are only a few daylight hours available for foraging.

Photo: Marie Read
Photo: Marie Read

In addition, birds have higher metabolisms than we do, and a chickadee’s normal temperature is a feverish 108 °F.  To make things even worse, the smaller an animal’s body, the greater its surface-area-to-volume-ratio, and the more quickly it loses heat to the air.  These unforgiving laws of physics and biology mean that the diminutive chickadee lives right on the energetic edge in winter.  An unusually cold night or a badly-timed snowstorm can mean the difference between death and life.

Luckily, the chickadee has a number of physiological and behavioral adaptations that help it survive.  It arises before dawn in order to forage in the half-light and its bold, inquisitive nature seems to give it an edge when it comes to finding food.  It is omnivorous and adaptable, able to take advantage of almost any source of nutrition: insects, arthropods, seeds, berries, and even fat and meat from carrion (or suet from feeders).  These gregarious birds often feed with other species because more eyes can find more food as well as spot more predators.  Chickadees are nothing if not industrious; they cache food items in the autumn for later use, and they squirrel away whatever they can steal from backyard feeders during the winter.  It takes a lot of memory to recall the locations of all of those hidey-holes, year after year – chickadees can live for a decade or more – and their tiny brains literally fill up after one season.  In order to compensate for a limited amount of storage space, the neurons associated with last year’s caches die off each autumn and new ones grow afresh.

Photo: Marie Read
Photo: Marie Read

The other part of the winter-survival equation is minimizing heat loss.  On sunny days, the chickadee may turn its darker back and wings to the sun.  Fat is an excellent insulator, but the chickadee depletes most of its reserves every night just to stay alive.  Therefore, its greatest defense against cold is its feathers, which increase in number by twenty-five percent after the autumn molt and are remarkably dense for the bird’s size.  Down feathers, with their fluffy, disorganized structure, trap a layer of insulating warm air next to the skin; the outer feathers, with their interlocking barbs and oily coatings, create a shield against water and wind.  By fluffing its feathers, the chickadee can increase its insulation and reduce its surface-area-to-volume ratio as long as the weather is neither too windy nor too wet.  The eye and beak are poorly insulated, so a bird may close its eyes or tuck its head under its wing.  Birds’ feet and legs seem to be insensible to cold surfaces, partly because they are covered with thick scales and partly because blood flow to these extremities is greatly reduced in cold weather.  This is possible because a bird’s legs are twigs of bone and sinew, tissues with low metabolic demands; they are controlled like a pair of chopsticks by muscles that are close to the body.  In a pinch, the bird may stand on one leg and tuck the other under its breast feathers, or huddle over both feet.

The chickadee stays warm all day by exercising and shivering, but when night falls, it must find shelter.  Small, enclosed areas like tree cavities are best, but sometimes, any spot that blocks the wind will have to do.  When the temperature drops very low and survival is precarious, the chickadee slips into a state of controlled hypothermia called torpor in which its body temperature falls by about twenty degrees.

Before dawn, the chickadee will emerge from torpor, warming itself to normal body temperature by shivering.  With its feathers askew after a long night of squashing itself into a crevice, it will rejoin its mates for yet another day of life on the very edge.

This story by Jacqueline Stuhmiller first appeared in our newsletter, The Land Steward, as part of the Closer Look series about plants and animals of the Finger Lakes region.

Want to know more about animals and plants of the Finger Lakes?

Take a closer look!

Teasel

Photo: Melissa Groo

Animals and Plants of the Finger Lakes

Teasel: Our Prickly Relationship

Today, the town of Skaneateles is known for its quaint main street and its clear lake.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, it had a very different claim to fame.

It was the center of the U. S. teasel industry.

Teasels (Dipsacus spp.) are a prodigiously spiny Old World genus of flowering plant that can grow six or more feet high.  On first glance, the teasel might be confused with the thistle, another tall, prickly non-native often found growing in sunny, disturbed areas.  However, the teasel is easily identifiable by its unusually large (up to 4” long), oval flowerheads.  Tiny flowers, ranging in hue from white to purple, initially open in a band around the middle of the inflorescence; as the first blossoms fade, the flowers directly above and below them come into bloom, creating two bands of color that travel in opposite directions.  The seedheads often remain through the winter, creating starkly elegant patterns against the snow.

Photo: Melissa Groo
Photo: Melissa Groo

The teasel’s common name comes from an Old English word, tæsan, meaning “to pull [apart].”  (It is the same root of our word “to tease”; composure frays under constant vexation, just as fiber does.)  The bristly seedhead of the teasel has been used since time immemorial to card wool.  In nineteenth-century woolen mills, teasel heads were used to brush the woven fabric (a process known as “raising the nap”) in order to create a soft, uniform surface.  They are superior for this purpose — wire brushes often damage the fibers — but they wear out quickly, so that they must constantly be replaced.  In the 1830s, an enterprising apothecary named Dr. James Snook realized that Skaneateles had the perfect climate and soil composition to grow this useful crop.  He imported the European cultivated variety (D. sativus), and soon Skaneateles teasels were not only consumed domestically but also exported to Europe.  The industrial use of teasels was eventually phased out in the mid-twentieth century when foreign competition forced the U. S. woolen industry to cut costs wherever it could.

The plant that was once the pride and joy of Skaneateles has become a thorn in the side of much of the U. S. and southern Canada.  It has long since naturalized in many areas and forms intensely prickly and hardy monocultures that crowd out native vegetation.  Cultivated teasel is now possibly extinct in the Finger Lakes, having been supplanted by two wild strains: the common teasel (“wild,” “fuller’s,” or “Indian” teasel, and confusingly identified as both D. fullonum and D. sylvestris) and the cut-leaved teasel (D. laciniatus).  These plants were probably introduced to the continent by early settlers, and their seeds may also have been accidentally mixed with those bound for Skaneateles fields.

Once teasels become established in an area, they are hard to eradicate.  Their basal leaves shade the ground so that nothing else can grow and their long, thick taproots make the plant resistant to both drought and physical removal.  They can tolerate soil salinity (in the Finger Lakes, a side effect of salting roads in winter), and their seeds are not damaged by water; as a consequence, they have spread rapidly along both highways and waterways.  Remarkably, this endlessly adaptable plant also appears to be partially carnivorous.  The genus name Dipsacus is derived from the Greek for “thirst,” a reference to the cup-like leaf bases that fill with rainwater.  These phytotelmata, as such tiny pools are known, may be designed to discourage aphids from climbing the stem.  They often contain the bodies of unfortunate invertebrates, which the teasel seems to be able to digest, though the mechanism by which it does so is not yet known.  A rich diet of insects greatly increases seed production, all the more impressive when one realizes that a single plant can produce over two thousand seeds.

Teasels are hard to eradicate from the landscape, not merely because of their astonishing ability to use every resource at their disposal, but also because many people find them both useful and beautiful. Their handsome flower and seedheads attract both birds and insects, and their popularity in floral arrangements has made them a common cemetery weed.  The seedheads are sometimes used to make toys and decorations, and are still considered to be superior tools for cloth finishing.  D. fullonum can even be used to create both blue and yellow dyes.  Various parts of the plant are used in folk medicines; legend has it that the water from the leaf bases makes a very effective beauty treatment.  Despite its noxiousness, it’s impossible not to find the teasel rather endearing: like the settlers who introduced it, it is hardy, a bit odd, and wonderfully stubborn — a very American weed, in its own way.

This story by Jacqueline Stuhmiller first appeared in our newsletter, The Land Steward, as part of the Closer Look series about plants and animals of the Finger Lakes region.

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Trailblazers!

Photo: FLLT

You’re Invited to Get Outdoors with Our Land Trust Volunteers

How does the Finger Lakes Land Trust maintain thousands of acres of nature preserves across a 12-county region with a small staff of only a few people?  Volunteers!  Sign up here!

The Land Trust operates over 30 nature preserves that are free and open to the public for quiet recreation.  You can see a few of them on the Go Finger Lakes map (find the tree icons) and you can see them all on our web site at fllt.org/map.  We care for them with our volunteer corps!

Here are a few photos of volunteers including our “Trailblazers,” who build trails, clear brush, construct signs, and generally care for the nature preserves, and others who help us host educational and recreational events that are open to the public.

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Volunteering is a great way to meet new people, do good work, and get outdoors in the beautiful Finger Lakes.

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