I admit it: most of my friends are cooler than me.

You may have heard last month about the U.S. government’s plan to drop acetaminophen-laced mice on the island of Guam to control its invasive population of brown tree snakes. Well, I was able to get the inside scoop on this odd-sounding idea, because a college friend of mine happens to be a brown tree snake biologist on Guam and is involved with this project. Meredith, who has her own blog that you should all try to convince her to start updating more often, agreed to tell you all a little more about her awesome job and what is going on with the Tylenol mice. This may be the first in a series of similar Q&A posts, but that depends on me being able to talk other people I know into doing this, so we’ll see.

Q: Who are you?

A: My name is Meredith Palmer and I graduated with a degree in Zoology back in 2011. I have recently been accepted back into school for my PhD and am very much looking forward to grappling with my own research again coming up this fall! I will be working on the behavioral ecology of lions and predator-prey interactions in the Serengeti. (Note from Rebecca: yes, she is going to study African megafauna for her PhD. Wow. Meredith, can I visit?) Over the past few years, I have been working field assistant jobs in Africa and the Caribbean.

Q: What do you do for a living?

A: I am currently working as a biologist for the United States Geological Survey on the Pacific island of Guam. I am part of the Brown Tree Snake (Boiga irregularis, BTS) lab, founded by the famous (in some circles, at least!) Dr. Julie Savidge from Colorado State University. Julie was the one who discovered, in the 1960s, that the BTS were responsible for the drastic decline and extinction of almost all of the island’s avifauna and herpetofauna. Guam is one of the best case studies for the destructive power of invasive species and one of the few examples of an ecosystem being decimated by an invasive reptile. Extirpating the BTS from Guam is considered a bit of a lost cause at the moment (it would cost approximately a billion dollars to eradicate the snake from the island), but my lab studies their movement/dispersal abilities, feeding and reproductive ecology, growth rates, and tests new methods of trapping that can be deployed to stamp out the snakes more effectively should they invade any new ecosystems. Unfortunately, Guam is a major military hub and the potential for snakes to hitch a ride to any of our neighboring islands or – heaven forbid – Hawaii, if distressingly high. While a different sector of the government (USDA) is in charge of keeping snakes off the planes, another part of our job is to train for “Rapid Response.” Should there be a potential BTS sighting on a surrounding island, we can get sent at the drop of a hat to go over and confirm/deny the sighting and attempt to halt any new invasion before the BTS can establish. (More at http://www.fort.usgs.gov/Resources/Education/BTS/)

Q: What’s your favorite part of your job?

A: There’s a variety of projects that we get to work on, some of which take us to neat places and let us play with fancy equipment. I particularly enjoy surveys we’ve conducted of endangered swiftlet caves. The Marianas swiftlet is one of the few native birds left on Guam and resides in only a handful of caves in the southern part of the island. Every three or four months we get to go out and patrol the caves for snakes using military-issue night vision goggles! These things cost more than my car, and work just like they do in the movies. The caves also have old cave paintings from the indigenous island culture (Chamorro) on the walls and Japanese artifacts lying around from WWII. There’s a lot of WWII history to discover all throughout the island – such as the two undetonated bombs that were once found in one of our field sites! I also really enjoy living on an island. Although the biodiversity on land isn’t as high as other islands I’ve spent my time on, the underwater scene is mind-blowing.

Q: What’s your least favorite part about your job?

A: It’s a bizarre dynamic for me as a herp person to have to go around telling people on Guam that “snakes are bad” and to “kill every snake you find,” because anywhere else, I would be encouraging exactly the opposite behavior. Promoting fear and dislike of snakes goes against my core instincts, even though I realize that in this particular case it is necessary to instill this mindset.

Q: What’s the deal with the whole Tylenol mice thing, and what role do you play in that?

A: Acetaminophen is toxic to snakes, and a new control method we’re testing out involves filling dead mice with Tylenol and shooting them into the forest out of a helicopter in the hopes that the snakes find and eat these deadly bundles! The mice will be attached to streamers so that they get caught in the trees where snakes typically forage. Using the helicopter enables us to disperse mice over large tracts of lands. Conveniently, these snakes are very much generalist foragers and aren’t picky about consuming dead food (they’ve even been documented going through people’s trash and munching on BBQ ribs and chicken wings!) and there aren’t other animals on the island that would eat these type of baits and also get poisoned. Last year, a test drop took place in which mice were dropped that had radio transmitters inside. From what I understand, the radio telemetry results indicated that all mice had in fact been eaten by snakes. This next drop is going to be conducted over a large tract of land in the air force base. While the USDA is in charge of dropping the mice, our crew will be conducting the pre-drop and post-drop population censuses to determine whether there is a decrease in snake activity after the drop. We’re currently clearing transects in the drop site and control sites that we will patrol at night over the upcoming months. When we visually locate a snake, we will catch them, take morphometric data, and insert PIT tags into them so that we can tell individuals apart. Fingers crossed for promising declines!

There you have it. One other note, Meredith is already internet famous – her sweet trilobite tattoo was featured by National Geographic blogger Carl Zimmer back in January!

I spent the afternoon snowshoeing into a wilderness area with a group of teenagers, but I was too focused on them to spend any time looking for natural history stuff to photograph for this blog. (Yep, snowshoeing. Yesterday was the first day of spring, you say? Don’t make me laugh. It was -17ºF here a few days ago.) Anyway, luckily there’s been a lot of interesting new articles and whatnot floating around this week, so I’m going to treat you to another linkspam post instead.

• The population of Monarch butterflies overwintering in Mexico is hitting a record low. Not good, not good at all.
• This aerial photo makes the reason for declining bee and butterfly populations in North America glaringly obvious.
• Great post on why the idea of reviving extinct animal species is actually kind of arrogant and anthropocentrist (shut up, spell check, anthropocentrist is totally a word).
• As both a birder and a lifelong Star Trek fan, this photo puts a smile on my face (though you’d have to be a Trekkie to understand why).
• Famous naturalist William Bartram claimed to have seen a weird, brightly colored vulture in Florida in 1774. No one has ever taken the sighting all that seriously – until now.
• Pesticides, not habitat loss, may be the primary cause of grassland bird declines.
• National Audubon Society, I am shaking my head at you. Feral cats are terrible for native wildlife, and trap-neuter-release does not work.
• Great photos and video of a displaying Ruffed Grouse.
• This Song Sparrow sings opera. No, seriously, watch the video, it’s crazy.

Have a great rest of your week, and I’ll be back with new material soon!

I finally managed to get a couple decent photos of our Red-breasted Nuthatches – they’re very common here, but they’re quick little buggers! This one is a male, which you can tell from his coal-black cap (on females it’s more grayish). I love their colors, the slaty blue-gray back, the striped face, the buffy underparts. In my totally subjective opinion, they’re far more handsome than their larger white-breasted cousins, and I love their nasal little calls. Where I grew up in Ohio, White-breasted Nuthatches were by far the more common species, with Red-breasteds only visiting occasionally in the winter. Here in the North Woods we have both year-round.

Nuthatches get the nickname “devil down-heads” from their habit of working their way down the trunks of trees head-first in search of food (insects etc.), the opposite of woodpeckers, who generally start lower down on the tree and work their way up. That doesn’t mean they won’t flip right-side up to dig into a particularly promising clump of dead wood, though.

I took a quick glance at what I was posting about at this time last spring – woodcocks displaying, spring peepers calling, butterflies on the wing, pussy willows and hazelnut bushes in bloom. Hard to believe when this year we’re still blanketed under a couple feet of snow.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed this if you’ve been in the woods in winter: as the season goes on (and on and on, if you live where I do), the first place snow starts to retreat a little is often around the bases of the trees. Why?

The answer is actually not all that exciting. A few plants, such as skunk cabbage, actually do generate their own heat early in the spring, but as far as I know that’s not the case for the sugar maples and other common trees here. The most likely explanation is just that the relatively dark color of the tree bark absorbs more heat and, as a result, melts the surrounding snow. Still, any sign of spring is cause for celebration at this point!

My feet on the left in modern-style snowshoes, Leanna’s on the right in traditional snowshoes she wove and lacquered herself.

This afternoon I talked my friend Leanna into snowshoeing back out to Inkpot Lake with me – some students had told me they’d seen signs of Black-backed Woodpecker activity out there, and I was skeptical but I wanted to check it out. We took snowshoes instead of skis this time to make bushwhacking around on the boggy lakeshore easier.

Being a pair of naturalist nerds, we spent the whole hike out stopping to examine the tracks and scat we found along the trail. (Click any image to bring up a slideshow with captions.)

Did we find any signs of Black-backed Woodpeckers? Did we have any other interesting wildlife encounters at the lake? Come back Friday to find out. (Spoiler alert: the answer is yes.)

Okay, so if you remember from Wednesday, the reason we were snowshoeing out to Inkpot Lake was to check out some reports of Black-backed Woodpecker activity in the area. Black-backed Woodpeckers are a boreal species with a habit of flaking the outer layer of bark off of dead conifers in search of food, leaving large patches of the red cambium underneath exposed. No one I know has ever seen one here on campus. They’re uncommon, picky about their habitat, and mostly found further north than this – we’re near the southern extent of their range.

We bushwhacked along the boggy lakeshore (not something you could easily do in summer, but you can snowshoe over it okay) to get to a thicket of alders, spruce, and tamarack that looked promising, where we found… this.

Yes? No? Maybe so? I’m no expert, but if someone who was told me this was Black-backed Woodpecker activity, I would believe them. I think they tend to move around a lot during the winter, so it’s possible that whatever did this has moved on already, but the fact that there are bark flakes on top of the snow suggests to me that this happened a couple weeks ago at most.

We had one more interesting wildlife encounter before we left the lake, which I was going to include here, but this is plenty of photos for one post already so I think I’ll keep you in suspense until Monday. Next week is my spring break and I’m going to visit my parents, so my next few posts after that will be about Arizona – expect desert wildflowers and, if I’m lucky, maybe Elegant Trogons!

(I swear this is not an April Fool’s Day post. I tried and failed to think of something clever for April Fool’s Day. This is just the continuation of Part 1 and Part 2 of last week’s snowshoe adventure.)

Okay, so we maybe, possibly found evidence that there have been Black-backed Woodpeckers hanging around Inkpot Lake this winter. Did we see anything else worth mentioning? Yes. Yes we did.

In February I wrote about a previous expedition to Inkpot Lake and included a photo of a tunnel in the snow that, judging by the tracks leading to it, had been made by an otter. This time we found the edges of the lake heavily crisscrossed with more otter tracks and belly slides. Clearly this is a popular spot for them.

Snowshoe hare tracks on the left, otter belly slide on the right.

So, as we left the boggy area behind and worked our way back around the canoe launch, I kept pausing to examine every dark dot on the far side of the lake with my binoculars. I found a lot of stumps and bushes, but finally I found a dark dot that moved. Ready for a really terrible photo of an otter?

Ta-da!

Actually we counted three otters total, frolicking around on the opposite side of the lake from us. It was pretty great. After I commented “Wow, it’s a whole pile of otters,” Leanna wondered what the collective noun for otters really is, so I looked it up and according to Wikipedia one word that gets used is “romp.” A romp of otters! Perfect!

We declared this adventure to be a huge success.

When I left my house on Saturday morning it was snowing, but here I am in southern Arizona for my spring break, where at this time of year the daily high temperature is around ninety and the air smells of orange blossoms. This is also the time of year when all the desert wildflowers are in bloom – click on any tile below to bring up a slideshow with captions.

Okay, there is really nothing in this photo to give you much of a sense of scale, but this is the Western Pygmy-Blue (Brephidium exilis), also known as the smallest butterfly in North America, with a wingspan of about half an inch. They seem to be pretty common around here (“here” being the Phoenix area), but since they’re so small it would be easy to overlook them.

The Western Pygmy-Blue is really a great example of why it pays to take a second look at things that are small and inconspicuous. Yes, it’s tiny – but look at the beautiful detailed patterns on its wings. What a lovely creature!

I’m back in Wisconsin now, but I have a couple more Arizona posts to share with you. We had the opportunity to observe some interesting lizard behavior in Usery Mountain Regional Park in the Phoenix area when this little guy started running down the trail ahead of us, curling up its tail to display the black and white stripes on its underside.

This is a zebra-tailed lizard (Callisaurus draconoides), and the tail thing is a display to warn off predators.

We also did some sightseeing in the southeastern part of the state and found this group of lizards resting between some rocks in Madera Canyon.

This, I think, is Clark’s spiny lizard, Sceloporus clarkii. (If you know better please correct me in the comments.) I love the blue highlights, which so many male lizards have.

Alligator Juniper, that is! This fantastic tree, Juniperus deppeana, is common in the woods of southeastern Arizona. Take a closer look at that fantastic bark.

Gorgeous. No other juniper species has bark like this, and I love it. Do you agree that it resembles alligator skin?

The scientific name of the Greater Prairie Chicken is Tympanuchus cupido. Translated from Latin, that loosely means “drummer of love.” The quirky name comes from its elaborate and famous courtship ritual, and Sunday morning I was lucky enough to witness it.

Greater Prairie Chickens, technically a species of grouse, used to be common, but their numbers plunged as the country’s grasslands were converted to agriculture, and now they’re mostly limited to carefully managed and protected prairie remnants like those found in Central Wisconsin. Anyone can pay $15 for the privilege of getting up at 4 AM on the April morning of their choice, tucking themselves into a wooden blind so small that it’s hard to sit upright, and sitting in the freezing cold darkness waiting for the birds to appear for their performance. It’s totally worth it.

The males are the ones who put on the display, known as “booming” – they stomp their feet, raise their tails and the feathery pinnae on their necks, and inflate eye-catching orange air sacs that produce a surprisingly melodic fluting sound. In theory, the females then come and choose the best-looking guys. We didn’t see any females while we were there, but that didn’t seem to deter the males, who danced and danced and danced, pausing only when a Northern Harrier swooped over and flushed them temporarily. This sort of communal display is called a “lek.”

Each one stakes out his own little territory to perform in, and every so often disputes arise, leading to a lot of chicken-like clucking and cackling and occasional physical aggression (this next photo is very blurry, and the one after it isn’t great either, but you try getting a photo of birds in motion in dim morning light).

By 7:30 it was fully light, we still had yet to see a single hen, and there was less actual booming and more preening and pecking at seeds going on outside the blind, so we finally left. After reading descriptions of this ritual and seeing many photos of it, getting to witness it first-hand was amazing, and I highly recommend it if you ever get the chance.

Birds with inflatable orange air sacs in their throats. Nature sure is weird. Weird, but pretty great.

Did anyone notice that I missed posting on Monday as usual? I was in Madison, at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies’ annual Earth Day Conference (yes, Earth Day is April 22, they were a week early). I got to see talks by Jane Goodall and Céline Cousteau, among others, as well as attend a really great panel on how species and ecosystems might respond to climate change. My favorite aspect of the conference was that it wasn’t just academics and environmental professionals there – attendees included lots of families, teenagers (including past students of mine), and other members of the public, interacting first-hand with scientists and activists. For someone like me who does work in this field, where it’s easy to get caught up in the stress and hustle of everyday tasks, events like this are an important way to get re-inspired and remember why I’ve chosen what can feel some days like a pretty thankless career path.

Then Monday night we made the four-hour drive back from Madison, where it’s chilly but at least there’s no snow on the ground, to Land O’ Lakes, where it still looks about like it did in January. A few weeks ago blogger and prairie ecologist Chris Helzer posted a great explainer on how this year’s late spring and last year’s early spring are both connected to global climate change. If I understand correctly, the idea is that the northern hemisphere’s air and water currents, including the Jet Stream, are ultimately driven by the temperature difference between cold Arctic waters and warmer temperate waters. As the Arctic warms, there’s less of a difference, and everything becomes a bit less stable, so that the Jet Stream wanders around a lot more than it used to. Last year it made a big northward loop, and most of the U.S. was on its southern side, getting warm southern air. This year it’s wandering to the south and the opposite is happening.

At the climate change panel at the conference, they showed us this graphic, and it made a big impression on me.

Click to view it full size so you can read the labels – the left half show changes in human activity over the past couple centuries, and the right half shows corresponding changes in the global environment, all on the same timescale. (Some of the data plotted might surprise you, like the amount of international tourism, or the number of McDonald’s restaurants.) Everything is connected, and everything is changing. Whatever happens, my generation is living through an important period in human history.

Steffen W et al. (2004). Global Change and the Earth System: a Planet under Pressure. The IGBP book series. Springer (Berlin, Germany), 336 p.

I’d been convinced for a while that even though we hadn’t seen or heard them yet, our woodcocks must be here somewhere, hunkered down and waiting for the weather to change so they could start their spring displays. Well, now I have proof – one of the teachers at the school where I work snapped this photo on campus earlier this week.

photo by Robert Eady

Poor sad, confused, hungry woodcock. Hang in there, little buddy.

No natural history news to report other than endless cold and wet and snow (temperatures dipped to zero F again over the weekend, and we’re under yet another Winter Storm Warning tonight). Instead, let me present another of my sporadic linkspam posts – recent bits of conservation and nature interestingness from around the internet.

• Climate change = snow melting earlier = white Snowshoe Hares on bare brown ground each spring. I’ve never actually laid eyes on a Snowshoe Hare but I’ve seen their tracks around here plenty of times.
• Amazing (and grisly) photos of an alligator eating a nutria in Texas.
• Why do we feel like bird feeders are okay but baiting owls with mice is not? A great 10,000 Birds post on where to draw the ethical line.
• A Storify summary of the Earth Day conference I attended last week.
• A concise explanation of hybridization in birds. My non-birding students are always surprised to learn that birds occasionally mate across species lines.
• At least somewhere there are wildflowers blooming.
• The always-wonderful Julie Zickefoose on painting a bird species she’s never seen in person.
• How much do you actually know about the humble dandelion?
• I love frogs and did frog calling surveys every spring in college, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a Mountain Chorus Frog.
• I didn’t get any photos of the Fox Sparrow that turned up at our feeder in the snow last weekend, but _CabinGirl has some great ones, so check them out.
• Interesting: red squirrels born in crowded forests get hormonal signals from mom to grow faster.

Feel free to share any interesting links you’ve come across lately in the comments, and have a good week!

With high temperatures reaching the fifties this week, the snow is finally – and slooooowly – starting to melt. However, it doesn’t melt at a uniform rate everywhere on the property. A number of factors can affect how fast the snow melts in a particular spot, one of which is aspect, the direction a slope faces.

Here is what the northern shore of one of the lakes on campus looked like this morning:

And here’s the southern shore of the same lake:

On the northern side of the lake, the sloping shore is facing toward the south, so it gets more sun each day and the snow melts faster as a result. You can see this same effect just driving along the roads here, with bare ground on the northern side of the road while the southern side still has a layer of snow.

I’m going to be donning long underwear and snowshoes to trek into the woods this afternoon, but there is a glimmer of hope in our weather forecast for the weekend!

(Lep = Lepidopteran = butterfly or moth. Come on, you knew that, right?)

There is hope for spring yet! In the past week we’ve had more and more migratory birds – sapsuckers, sparrows, Yellow-rumped Warblers – arriving back on campus, and yesterday afternoon I was out in the woods in just a t-shirt, though admittedly at the time I was slogging through a couple feet of slushy snow in my snowshoes. At this time of year, insects that normally might not catch my eye become cause for celebration. Case in point? This tiny, drab moth.

These little critters, each one about a centimeter long, were fluttering over the surface of the snow in the bog. I haven’t had much luck identifying them – there are many, many species of tiny drab moth, and I posted photos on BugGuide and Twitter but people suggested, like, three different possible families – but finding any moth at all feels like cause for celebration after this endless winter. Hooray!

Shall we take bets on what my first butterfly of the year will be? Mourning Cloak, Eastern Comma, Spring Azure?

Some of our woodpeckers – Downy, Hairy, Pileated – are year-round residents in the North Woods. Others – the Northern Flicker and the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker – are migrants, only here for the breeding season. Both of the migratory woodpeckers have just turned up here on campus in the last week or so, and my first inkling that the sapsuckers had arrived was hearing their distinctive irregular drumming. Taptaptap-tap-tap–tap—tap! (Click here to listen.)

This morning while I was rambling around a male flew in and landed on a nearby trunk at eye-level, posing for a few photos.

I’ve written before about sapsuckers’ interesting foraging habits – as their name suggests, they drill small holes in tree trunks and feed off the sap. I like these guys. That red cap and throat are a beautiful pop of color.

After a long, snowy winter, it is awfully nice to see (and hear) the spring birds returning to the forest.

Dear Angry Squirrel,

If your temper tantrums weren’t so photogenic

I wouldn’t linger so long with my camera at the foot of your tree

and you wouldn’t have reason to be so angry.

Love, Rebecca.

Last spring when I first noticed these fuzzy oblong shapes in the grass along the path, at first I mistook them for caterpillars.

Upon closer inspection, definitely not caterpillars. These are the catkins (male flowers) of aspen trees, and they are all over the place right now. Another sign of spring.