Diario de whichchick

It was lovely out on Saturday. I spent most of the day outside doing yard work but late in the afternoon, I got the kayak out and paddled up to the top of the lake to see about the things going on there. I didn't have as long to spend as I wanted b/c I had to go to a birthday cookout, but I made an effort.

It is difficult to take cellphone pix of dragonflies. However, the common green darner was out and about, in wheel with partner, which I did not expect this early in the year.

I also saw some kind of smallish basking turtles that plopped into the water before I could get close to them. I need to sneak up on them with my actual real camera and honkin' big telephoto lens because the stupid turtles are not cellphone-pix compliant.

Ordinary newts (N. viridescens ssp. viridescens) are active in the lake and have been for a while, no biggie there. I'm not gonna spam ya'll with pix of ordinary newts. We have 'em and they are plentiful as hell.

Didn't see the watersnakes yet but we have 'em. More research is needed there.

I also scouted out where I think the rattlers den up, an area for further inspection when it gets warmer. Need tall boots for that, I reckon, and possibly a telephoto lens b/c do not want to get up in the snakes personal business or anything. Not trying to harass the sneks. They're not out and about until May anyhow, especially when the April is as crappy as this one has been.

As yet the aquatic vegetation is barely tipping green. Cattails and such are like an inch above ground because it is still (mostly) cold here. Still interested in sedges but I can't do much on the ID front when they're like an inch of pointy green bits.

Last week I set the game cam up where I think the fisher lives. It needs to be there for like two weeks -- they have a decent sized range -- so I won't be up to get it until the first week of May. Not worried someone else will take it, as it's way back in the sticks and relatively inconspicuous. Here's hoping for fisher pix but y'know, maybe that's all in my mind.

I am seriously jealous of other people's (further south) spring pix. Still not spring here.

In the review of literature I posted a link to (http://publications.aston.ac.uk/15210/1/Folios_lichen_growth_review_for_pdf.pdf), a resource I'm using because it's online and free, there is some fun stuff. I'll try an ELI5 for you.

Scientist Armstrong, in a 1984 effort to understand how round, foliose lichens (specifically, these ones here: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/203800-Xanthoparmelia-conspersa ) grew, cut the lichens apart along the lobes of the thallus structures and then GLUED THEM BACK TOGETHER either in the same arrangement or in a different arrangement to see if they grew any differently. Imma quote the summarized results from the literature review but add some bold for decoration and to help with clarity and the wow factor.

"In addition, gluing the lobes in a different configuration from the original or constructing thalli in which each lobe was removed from a different ‘parent’ thallus did not affect the degree of lobe growth variation. These results support the hypothesis that lobe growth variation is a property of individual lobes and not of the thallus as a whole."

Neat, innit? This frankensteining of lichens suggests strongly that each individual lobe on a thallus (one part of a round foliose lichen) is kind of its own thing.

In a somewhat less-foliose lichen, they also retain some individuality (or whatever) even after they grow together. You can see this in a nice picture I took of what I'm pretty sure is a cluster of Porpidia albocaerulescens. It was striking because the sections reminded me of giraffe spots, kinda. Anyways.

If they all grew into each other or something, it'd be one big lichen without interior boundaries. But it doesn't do that. The boundaries between what used to be separate lichens are clearly visible even after they grew together. I wonder what's going on there?

Is there some sort of minimal-distance-from-the-edge for the little cup fruiting structures? Chemical signalling? Border wars? The mind boggles.

Birds are difficult for me to photograph. Today I saw a pileated woodpecker. White following patches on wings, red crested head, Kuk-kuk-kuk. It's a pretty distinctive bird, but I was not particularly quickdraw on my phone so, lolnope.

Yesterday I was taking a smallish tree off the road, surprised the beaver at the playground. (It's an itinerant young beaver, the which we get sometimes. They are cleared out when we get 'em because I have a friend who traps. But there's a permanent population downstream and every couple of years we get some when the parents throw them out into the world.) I went from "that is not a goose" to "Heck it's a beaver" to Tail slap and submerged departure.

Frogs. We have more than spring peepers but apparently I am not good at recording frogs. They just shut up when I whip out the phone. Bad frogs. Also I can't see the darned things, ever. Frogs are better at camo than I am at seeing frogs.

Squirrels (I do not live in suburbia) run to the other side of the tree. Stupid squirrels.

And even when I can Photograph The Observation, sometimes the picture is not so much "Observe The Observation" as it is "Find The Salamander". I said last time that I wasn't going to spam people with pictures of newts, but apparently I do not understand what people want to see... so... here you go, a game of what I like to think of as Spot The Newt. Each of these pictures contains AT LEAST one more-or-less visible newt. Two pictures have two newts. Have fun!