This week in the woods marks the waning days of some of our earliest-blooming spring ephemerals. The region has two spring beauty species – Carolina spring beauty (Claytonia caroliniana, with leaves pictured in the top-right photo) and Virginia spring beauty (C. virginica, with pointier, blade-like leaves). Both have five symmetrical white petals lined with delicate pink pinstripes. Most often open in the mid-morning sun, the blossoms close in cold, under cloud cover, and in rain. Wet conditions also make for a higher likelihood of the plants developing spring beauty rust – a reddish-brown parasitic fungus that covers and extracts nutrients from the photosynthesizing parts of the plant, starting with its leaves.
Spring beauties provide important early food for forest bees, especially the spring beauty miner bee, which we wrote about last year. One of the most abundant bee species in hardwood forests during the spring, Andrena erigeniae has an especially close relationship with these flowers: the males loiter around them in wait for the females, which collect the pink pollen to provide for their larvae.
An early migrant, the hermit thrush arrived this past month, and pairs have begun forming or, in some cases, reuniting in their former territories to nest. After a winter consuming berries, they have transitioned to feeding largely on earthworms, caterpillars, snails, beetles, and spiders. Invertebrates serve more purpose than just food, though; hermit thrushes sometimes exhibit “anting” behavior, whereby they rub ants on their plumage. The formic acid the distressed ants release possibly helps defend the birds against external parasites. The American robin gives the color “robin’s egg blue” its name, but American thrush species – robins and bluebirds, as well as spotted thrushes like hermit thrushes – all lay blue eggs. Hermit thrushes’ well-constructed cup nests consist of moss, bark fibers, grass, leaves, and small roots, either concealed on the forest floor or in low woody cover. Males attract females with haunting, ethereal songs made all the more mysterious by the fact that they come from elusive birds obscured in the underbrush. Their call is a soft chuck.
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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