This week in the woods, male wild turkeys continue to put on breeding displays for females, with dramatic, attention-getting gobbles, postures, and color changes. With their gobbling, the toms attract flocks of prospective mates (and sometimes competing toms) to forest clearings, where they spend weeks strutting and jockeying. Their display entails erect plumage, fanned tail, wings dragging across the ground, low-pitched chumps or humming known as “the pulmonic puff,” and an inflated crop. Within seconds of another turkey’s approach, the featherless head and neck brighten: wartlike caruncles (bulbous growths at the base of the throat) and wattles (flaps of throat skin) enlarge and go from pink to red, and the limp, fleshy, fingerlike snood dangling from above the bill becomes engorged with blood and turns red or blue. Preoccupied males sometimes neglect eating while courting but have over the winter developed a thick layer of fat called the “breast sponge” for energy supplies during the springtime. After mating once, the female ventures off alone to scratch out a nest (a shallow depression lined with grass and leaves) and lay 8–15 buff, brown-spotted eggs.
Among the first of the spring ephemerals, bloodroot, which we wrote about at this time last year, has flowered. As Mary Holland addresses on her Naturally Curious blog, bloodroot limits self-pollination by having its stigma (the central, female part) become receptive before the male anthers of the same flower produce pollen. For the first few days of production, they bend downward and toward the flower’s outside, away from the centrally located stigma. Only if insect pollination does not take place within three days do the anthers bend inward, as they have begun to do here, and contact the stigma to self-pollinate the flower.
Nearby, this moth – Cladara atroliturata, known as “the scribbler” – settled upon a downed log. One of our earliest appearing moths, these larentiines fly April into June. Alders, birches, maples, and willows serve as hosts for their caterpillars.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.
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