White Slantline Moth on Mayapple flowers

 

A colony of Mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum) resembles a bunch of little green umbrellas thrusting from the forest floor. I photographed this colony deep in Shawnee State Forest (Scioto County, Ohio) on May 7 (2025).

As always, click the photo to enlarge

Fertile plants bear a gorgeous waxy-white flower that arises from the node where the two leaves diverge. The flower is often concealed by the leaves, at least to the upright observer.

It's worth going low to inspect Mayapple flowers, as they sometimes harbor a bit of Lepidopteran magic: White Slantline Moths (Tetracis cachexiata) that resemble the petals, and roost on the flowers during the day. Sometimes several moths can be found on one flower. In short order, I found three White Slantlines - all in separate Mayapple colonies - and surely could have found others had I continued the search.

PHOTO NOTES: I shot the last two images with (as always) my Canon R5 camera, and the amazing Canon 180mm f/3.5 macro lens. This lens was made from 1996 to 2021 and it is one of the sharpest lenses ever made. It also absolutely crushes the background, creating beautiful, creamy bokehs, as can be seen in the last two images. I like its longer reach, as it provides more versatility in how and where one can set up. The 180mm does not have image stabilization, and I made the above image at ISO 200, f/9, and a slow 1/13 exposure. Therefore, a tripod is important, and I have an Oben CTT-1000 carbon fiber tripod. It's miniature, going from ground level to perhaps a foot in height. Perfect for low subjects, and great for stabilizing the 180mm in low-light conditions. That lens also has a tripod collar, so it can easily be rotated while on the tripod.

Swainson's Warbler

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

A Swainson's Warbler shot from last week in Fayette County, West Virginia. In this region, these warblers typically frequent large tangles of Great Rhododendron, and catching even a glimpse in those thickets can be very tough. This bird occupied a deciduous forest opening and was much easier to see. I kept tabs on him for a half hour and could even watch his sparrow-like foraging behavior: using those big feet and large bill to turn leaves on the forest floor. This warbler is one of the rarest of the 38 extant species of eastern North America breeding warblers, with an estimated population of about 140,000 individuals. As a point of comparison, the Connecticut Warbler, a species much coveted by birders, has a total population estimated at about 1.8 million birds.

Red-eyed Vireo harvests tent caterpillar nest silk

Apologies for the lack of posts of late. I just returned from my annual foray to the wilds of West Virginia to participate in the New River Birding and Nature Festival. While there, I led trips for six days, then Shauna came down and we had an epic trip into the Monongahela National Forest yesterday. There we made many photographs of a variety of interesting organisms, some of which will probably surface here later.

FYI: The New River Birding and Nature Festival takes place late April/early May, and this was its 23rd year. This region of southern West Virginia is exceedingly rich in biodiversity, including birds, and our trips fan out to a variety of habitats. One of the main targets for many people is Swainson's Warbler (I'll try to make a separate post about that later), and the Fayetteville area (where we are based) is an epicenter for them. See more festival details HERE.

While leading the trips for the festival, I take next to no images and only carry my iPhone and my Canon R5 with a 24-105mm lens. The latter of which is used primarily to get group shots, and maybe some habitat images. As a guide, one must remain on point the entire time on the field, and prioritize helping group members get on birds, and learn more about natural history. There isn't time for taking images, although sometimes I experience some inner agony when we see amazing things and I cannot commemorate them photographically. But I get as much enjoyment out of seeing things and learning more about them as I do creating images.

With that in mind, the following photograph is shared courtesy of one of our participants on last Saturday's trip, Carisa Collins. She uses a Nikon point & shoot with an amazing reach and does a superb job of capturing images of various bird species that we see. The story and photo follow.

Photo courtesy Carisa Collins

Last Saturday, Geoff Heeter and I led a trip into the Summit Bechtel Reserve, a massive scout camp property near Fayetteville, West Virginia. We saw many interesting birds, but a personal highlight was seeing this female Red-eyed Vireo (females select nest sites and build the nest) collecting silk from an Eastern Tent Caterpillar (Malacosoma americanum) nest.

When we saw the bird approaching the nest, I thought the vireo was going to raid it for caterpillars (they are the bulk of a Red-eyed Vireo's diet). That would have been interesting, as the only birds that I know of that routinely raid these nests are cuckoos and Baltimore Orioles. Tent caterpillars are heavily beset with spines that inhibit most birds from eating them, and when in their silken nests are well protected from avian predation. Big cuckoos (both Black-billed and Yellow-billed) can rip into the nests and ravage the occupants. While a cuckoo may swipe a captured caterpillar back and forth across a branch in an attempt to remove some of the spiny hairs, they do end up swallowing many, and it is said that dissections of cuckoo specimens have revealed that the stomach linings are liberally fuzzed with hairs that penetrated the lining. I have heard that cuckoos can essentially regurgitate the stomach lining if it becomes too choked with tent caterpillar spines, and can regrow a new one, but haven't verified that.

Less well known is that Baltimore Orioles also feed on tent caterpillars. I made a post back in 2014 about this, with plenty of documentation. See that post RIGHT HERE.

Anyway, the vireo that is the protagonist of this story was only interested in the nest's silk, and she had to struggle to separate the wiry cable-like material. She'd tug and tug and tug before successfully separating a tuft of silk. It'll be used to bond her intricate cuplike nest.

Many people despise tent caterpillars - a native moth - because of the nests which they consider unsightly. That's a very shallow uninformed viewpoint. It is a native moth, the nests do not kill the host tree (cherries), and they spawn scores of insect species that prey on the caterpillars. Many of those insects, many of which are parasitoid wasps, in turn become food for other animals. The adult moths serve as pollinators and are eaten by other animals. Bats, who prey primarily on moths, surely eat many  tentworm moths. And now we know that Red-eyed Vireos - which winter in South America - utilize their nests. Eastern Tent Moths are a major keystone species with far-reaching importance when bird predators are factored in. Both Black-billed and Yellow-billed cuckoos, and Red-eyed Vireo, winter deep into South America, and Baltimore Orioles winter throughout much of Central America, northern South America, and the Caribbean islands. The lowly eastern tent caterpillar is an important part of their life cycle.

A "weedy" yard

 

As always, click the image to enlarge

A big patch of Common Blue Violet (Viola sororia) brightens my backyard. The white flowers sprinkled throughout are a form of this species known as the Confederate Violet (V. sororia forma priceana). I have encouraged violet proliferation by just not mowing them off while in flower, so they can set fruit. It's worked well and I've got scores of purple jots brightening the turf grass that remains. How this native violet could be considered a "weed" is beyond me (although a "weed" is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose). Moreover, spraying toxic chemicals to destroy them, in favor of a flawless emerald blanket of nonnative turf grass is crazy, in my opinion.

I made this shot of this Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) last April in one of my violet patches. I've seen these woodpeckers in the violets a few times, and I suspect they are hunting ants. Ants are major dispersers of violet seeds, and ants are a major part of a flicker's diet. If having a "weedy" violet-filled lawn means flickers, I'll take it.

This scene is even cooler than the violet explosion, to me. This area is the back half of the backyard (roughly one-quarter to one-third of ALL my remaining "yard"), and not so long ago it was all nonnative turf grass. About four or five years ago, I noticed clumps of a native sedge called Common Wood Sedge (Carex blanda) popping up back here. This is one of our more opportunistic native sedges (there are a few nonnative sedges) and I don't know how it got started here. It may be that I tracked back seeds of the sedge from one of my forays. No matter, it is there, and I adjusted the mowing regime to accommodate it. I just waited until the fruit (perigynia, in sedge-speak) were fully ripe, and then mowed it. The mower broadcast the hard, bony seeds (achenes, in sedge-speak) all over the place, and it worked. Now, 90+% of this part of the "lawn" is now native sedge. That's all I did.

In this shot, the sedge is in full flower. The tannish-brown spikes sticking up everywhere are the staminate (male) flowers. The pistillate (female) flowers are lower on the plant. The sedges only reach four or five inches in height. Unless I learn otherwise, there is no reason to routinely mow this area anymore. The sedge is the perfect height, in my opinion. I'll probably just mow it once annualy, late in the season. At least that's my plan for now. I'm also going to transplant some of the sedges to other parts of the lawn and hopefully get the entire backyard to become a blanket of Common Wood Sedge, interspersed with other various native flora.

While the sedge lawn may, to some eyes, look a bit coarser than the manicured nonnative turf grass that we've been programmed to plant, manage, and cherish, I think the sedge lawn is a vast improvement. Another benefit is that invertebrate life forms have spiked tremendously. The sedge forms a duff layer that seems to be far more conducive to animal life than that of sterile turf grass. One barometer of success is the sheer number of fireflies displaying in summer. Last year they had expanded to the point of dazzling. It was like a laser light show back there. Viewing them from a second-story window reveals that the displaying beetles stay almost entirely over my backyard, with little drift into the neighbors' yards (most of them manage for turf monocultures). Firefly larvae are ground dwellers and predatory, feeding on various small animal life. I would say that the sedge supports vastly more of a duff layer food web, thus the huge spike in fireflies.

If you'd like to shrink your lawn, experimenting with Carex blanda might be worth a try. I haven't researched where one might obtain it, but I think some native plant nurseries carry it. Try googling "Carex blanda nursery" or something like that, and you should find some sources.

Large-flowered Bellwort, and some plant photography thoughts

 

As always, click the image to enlarge

A Large-flowered Bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora), a personal favorite spring wildflower. This plant was long placed in the lily family (Liliaceae), but taxonomic splits in that family have led to the bellworts being placed in the Colchicaceae family, and apparently now it's been shifted to the Convallariaceae family. Wherever we humans decide to place it in our organizational schemes, this is a superb-looking plant.

Shauna and I made an epic trip to southern Ohio last Saturday and saw many species of spring wildflowers. We were mostly in Adams and Scioto counties, where the spring flora comes on significantly earlier than here in central Ohio. We were pleased to encounter many flowering specimens of this bellwort species at the Chalet Nivale Preserve. I find bellworts photographically irresistible and the specimen in the photo was in a particularly good spot for clean imagery, other than being hard to reach.

Shauna snapped this shot of your narrator making the image of the bellwort in the previous photo. It is not far from the base of the limestone cliff, right at my eye level.

While macro lenses are often standard fare for wildflower photography, I went off the reservation for this one. One, that slope was slippery, and scrabbling into position to shoot the bellwort with my 100mm macro lens would have awkward and probably hard on the other plants emerging around the bellwort. So, I bolted the Canon 400 DO II lens to my R5 and attached the rig to my big tripod (A Gitzo, with Wimberly head). While I normally use that tripod and the big lenses for birds and other wildlife, I discovered a long time ago that the big lenses can be superb for plant photography.

With no disturbance to the habitat, using this rig allowed me to get my lens at eye level to the subject. Even though the bellwort was too far for macro photography, I could frame fill it with this lens. As the subject is vertically oriented, I rotated the lens within its collar for a vertical perspective. The position that I liked best put me just inside the minimum focusing distance of the lens, which is about 11 feet. So, I slipped on a 25mm extension tube, and that problem was solved. FYI, in case you aren't familiar with them, extension tubes are just short hollow tubes (no glass) that fit between the camera body and lens. They create a bit more distance between lens and camera which reduces the minimum focus distance. I would highly recommend getting tubes with electronic connectors, so that they don't kill your ability to autofocus.

Once positioning the camera was accomplished, it was time to shoot. Another enormous asset of large prime telephoto lenses is the gorgeous creamy bokeh (background) that they create. Even though that cliff wall wasn't very far behind the subject, the 400 DO obliterated it into a grayish-brown blur. I helped that by shooting at f/5.6. In general, wider apertures are better, in my opinion, for floral subjects. Even though the 400 opens to f/4, I decided I liked the slightly increased depth of field by stopping down one stop. The shutter speed was 1/60, plenty fast enough. But shutter speed is largely irrelevant in plant photography. I have shot multiple second exposures and achieved tack sharp results of wildflowers. As there was a bit of wind this day, I chose to use a slightly higher ISO than normal and set that to 400 so that my shutter speeds could be a little faster than they would be at my preferred ISO of 100 or 200.

Another way to help freeze movement would be the use of a flash. For me, that's almost unheard of with plants. I think flash generally imparts a harshness to the subject and its environs that looks bad. I can assure you, that had I used flash on the bellwort pictured above, it would not look like that, and the look would be worse. I know there are ways to mute lighting from flashes, and I have all manner of diffusers. And corrections can be made later through editing. Nonetheless, flash-free images just look much better to my eye.

To further assist in removing possible movement caused by me, I had the camera's shutter on two-second delay. I also have the R5 set so that a touch of the rear viewing screen will instantly focus the camera on the spot that you touched and automatically start the two second delay. So, I just tap the bellwort's flower in my back screen, move away from the rig, and the camera focuses on the flower, the camera starts beeping and two seconds later it takes the photo. There's no way that I can accidentally bump or otherwise jostle the rig.

Great Horned Owlet, and a favored food

 

A young, and still quite fuzzy, Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus). It was one of two owlets fledged from a nest in a small west-central Ohio woodlot. The stick nest that they were born in looked like an old Red-shouldered Hawk nest to me - not very large, and in the crotch of a large maple about three-quarters the way up the tree. About half of the Great Horned Owl nests in this region utilize the abandoned stick platform nests of raptors and herons, and the other half use natural tree cavities.

The bird in the photo was not long out of the nest but can already make short flights. Its nestmate was in a nearby tree, but much higher up. The female owl was not far off, either.

An Eastern Cottontail poses in a violet patch in my backyard yesterday. At least three bunnies call my yard home, and this one is the largest. He's the size of a small cat.

Great Horned Owls prey heavily on rabbits. I'm sure that the young owl in my photo has dined on rabbit on numerous occasions. The male owl brings most if not all food to the juveniles, with the female pitching in if need be.

Cottontails breed prolifically and one pair can raise scores of kits over a year's time. Most will not make it to the size of the chap above, though. Rabbits are high on the menu for a raft of predators, not just owls.

Years ago, I was trolling a gravel lane in the wee hours in the middle of nowhere in Pike County, Ohio, conducting owl surveys for the Ohio Breeding Bird Atlas. Rounding a bend in the road - at very slow speeds, fortunately - I came across a Great Horned Owl sitting in the middle of the lane, freshly caught cottontail in its talons. The owl was not pleased with my appearance, and if looks could kill I would not be writing this. Its rabbit victim was so large that the owl could not get off the ground with it, so the burly owl physically dragged the bunny to a nearby embankment and hauled its prey up that. I then idled by at close range and on down the road, leaving the winged tiger to its rabbit steak.

An American Robin hunts worms

 

An American Robin (Turdus migratorius) with a just-captured earthworm. 

Last week, Shauna and I traveled to the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area on a whirlwind trip. I was to give a talk (moths) to the Garden Club of Allegheny County on Thursday, so we headed over bright and early on Wednesday to photography waterfalls around the Ohiopyle area.

Upon arriving at our cabin late that day after a photo outing, there was an American Robin on the lawn. Whoop de doo, you might think - robins are one of the most abundant and widespread birds in North America. That's one of their allures, to me. I can go to the wildest northern Michigan forest, midwestern prairie remnants, local parks, urban cityscapes, my back yard, and there they are. The big thrushes are nothing if not adaptable.

But robins are much more than adaptable. The robust caroling song is beautiful and a near ever-present sound of nature. They're showy, too - so much so, that if robins were rare, everyone would go ape over them. Their stout nests are remarkable architectural achievements: an adobe cup that dries to the hardness of a China bowl, and its neatly reinforced with grasses and other vegetation. And the color of the eggs spawned the name of a color: robin's-egg blue.

Anyway, as we took a moment to watch the robin, it suddenly lunged and caught a worm. Cool! Said I, then noted that photographing an American Robin in the act of snagging a worm was still on my bucket list. As there were several robins hunting the lawns, Shauna suggested that I go try and check that item off the list, so I did.

A male American Robin looks and listens for invertebrate prey in the grass. When one freezes, lowers its head and cocks it slightly, action is about to ensue. The robin is using its sensitive ears to listen for worms and other prey, as well as watching with keen eyes.

Bingo! The robin pounces! It has its head way down in the grasses and is about to come up with a favored prey item. I'm not sure the bird could even see the victim and may have divined its location entirely by ear.

PHOTO NOTES: I made all of these images with my Canon R5 and 400 DO II lens. It was coupled to the Canon 1.4xII extender, giving me 560mm of reach. That was plenty. Robins are fairly tame to begin with, and after a while this bird became used to me, and I was typically within 30-50 feet of it. I was shooting wide-open at f/5.6 (without the extender, the lens would be an f/4 of course). As robins in the midst of attacking prey can move with astonishing speed, I used a shutter speed of 1/2500. And, as almost always is best with animals, I was at or near ground level for these shots, to be on my subject's level. And the camera was on electronic shutter mode at 20 frames a second, to capture all of the action.

Unlike the worm in the first image, this one is a monster "nightcrawler". Here, the robin has just seized it and is working to tug the worm from the burrow. While such a task is fast and easy with a tiny worm, it is tougher when a big worm is involved. When under attack, the worm can bunch the powerful muscles that form rings down its body and plug itself into the burrow. Furthermore, worms are beset with rows of external setae - short stiff hairs - that can also help in holding it in place.

The robin tugs with all of its might. The bird is actually off of the ground and leaping/pulling backward. There were a few near extractions like this, and the worm would manage to tug itself further back into the hole. Then the robin would yank harder and in fairly short order it had won the battle.

The worm separates from the ground with great force, as if someone had let go of the other end of a Slinky. Its body coils sinuously as the pressure is instantly released, and the robin had it down the hatch shortly thereafter.

It should be noted that all of the large earthworms in this part of the world, insofar as I know, are not native. They are native to Europe and Asia and were brought over by accident in shipping material such as soils associated with nursery plants. It didn't take long for them to spread far and wide and increase enormously in abundance.

It didn't take long for the clever and adaptable American Robin to learn about worms and make them a large part of its diet.