Good time to be an Amphibian

As all of you know it has literally rained everyday for the past two weeks. All of this rain has saturated the ground with water so in many cases there is standing water through fields yards and wooded areas where once was dry. This can be obnoxious and annoying to us but for amphibians it is perfect. If you live in the country you certainly can tell this from the incredibly loud choir heard every evening of wood frogs, peepers and many others. This is also their time to mate and travel from wooded areas to ponds streams and lakes to reproduce. 

Wood frogs,Rana sylvatica,  a semi common frog found through out the united states is one of these in the choir. These frogs have some truly fascinating adaptations allowing them to survive over the winter months close to the surface in leaf litter or peat moss. They can tolerate the freezing of their blood and other tissues which is truly amazing as in order to do this you have be able to when you freeze not have your cells burst. They do this by producing large quantities of urea in there tissues and then turn the glycologen in their livers to glucose, these two adaptations allow for limited ice growth through these areas. The rest of a wood frogs body can freeze up to 65% of the water content in a wood frog can turn to ice. There is also sexual dimorphism in wood frogs as shown below the female is about 1.5 times larger than the male and is also a different color. This is common in animals and is found commonly in all the different animal kingdoms especially in insects.   

  

Spotted salamanders

During the first warm wet days of spring amphibians called spotted salamanders begin to mate. Spotted salamanders are very cool amphibians as they are quite large unlike some of the other salamanders that you commonly see these range between 4-9 inches. There a purplish color with bright yellow spots on there back hence the name. These salamanders have another very unique adaptation they have developed a symbiotic relationship with algae actually living inside the embryos of the eggs. This is a recent discovery and this makes the spotted salamander the only known vertebrate to have an endosymbiont (a co-evolution with algae where the algae makes food for the animal).
Spotted salamanders are found through out the Northern and Midwestern states reaching up into Canada. They usually live in burrows and under logs and foliage so it is quite hard to spot them while walking around. But they are quite abundant.

Spotted salamander - Ambystoma maculatum

A picture of the Salamander in the pond with a newt in the background.

Journal list

7 things I did for my project last week.
1) Staked out my transect with plots
2) Walked my transect with a G.P.S. and recorded the elevation of the stops.
3) recorded data from my walks on to Excel
4) Practied identifcation of different tree species along with amphiban species.
5) Took pictures of different trees and idenfied them on my comptuer
6) started to practice different identifiying different bird calls.
7) Thoguht about ways to start identifying plants at different trasect stops.

reflection of the week

This week went by very fast, I have worked a lot on my project. I have been doing many walks and recording the data and after doing these walks along my transect I found it very hard to follow on and now have decided to take Stakes and hammer them into the ground to keep my barrings straight. I will also use these stakes as survey points. I am about to go and setup the stakes but first I have to drill holes in them in order to put string through them. After I am done with this it will help me a whole lot to say on the path. 

I also this week saw an American Kestrel on my land I haven't seen one of these for a long time and I thought it was pretty cool. These birds are declining in this region do to the farming fields going back to woods. This is where they hunt so it was neat to see one of these birds on my land. A Kestrel is a type of falcon and is quite small they eat mice voles and other small creatures. I have a picture of it below. 

American Kestrel

Hardwood tree identification

I went on another walk today and decided to take pictures of a few different hardwoods that are found on my land. These trees are what most of the woods were made up of a couple hundred years ago. Hardwoods are all deciduous which means they loose there leaves in the winter unlike evergreens and most pines. Hardwoods range from Maples to Cherries to Williows. I have some pictures of a few Hard woods below and how to identify them.

This is a picture of a Black Cherry trees bark. This is  a very easy way to tell it is a black cherry as the bark is very dark and is chipping like flakes. These trees are very expensive hardwoods for two reasons one they have a unique wood color and 2 they usually don't grow straight for very long so it is hard to make lumber out of them. 

This is a picture of a Red Maple, The bark is smoother than that of an ash and makes as the tree gets older plates form on the bark. 

This a picture of a type of hawthorn most likely a Pear Hawthorn, but Hawthorns are very complicated to distinguish between others and a lot are varieties of the pear hawthorn I will just call this a Pear Hawthorn. Hawthorns are easily identifiable as they have HUGE thorns and are very sharp. 

A neat feature of the hawthorn is it's thorn. The northern Shrike is a predatory bird similar size to a jay and since they do not have a very strong ripping power with there beaks they sometimes use Hawthorns in order to skewer their prey and then tear it apart using the thorns as leverage.  

Also on my walk I decided to lay Stakes out for my Transect line as this will allow me to follow the path much more clearly than how I am currently able to. I am thinking of putting around 20-25 stakes on the transect and i'm not sure if I will tie a string around them or not. I am thinking of having the stakes represent spots where I put a meter square down and record the flora that I find there. This would make it very easy to keep a record on where I am plotting surveys. 

Pine trees spruces and tamarack identification

So today on my walk I was looking closely at pine trees and identifying them. Pines are usually an in between species during succession. Succession is a process from when a field goes back into being a forest, this is occurring quite substantially in New York as most of the family farms are out of business and those fields are going back to the way they were 200 years ago. Pine trees are first growth trees that come after bushes during the succession stages and this process is going on along the top of my hill. The most common pine here is a White pine and they are all over my land. Some other common types of Pines found around here are Red pine, Blue Spruce, Red Spruce, Eastern Hemlock. I took some pictures of a few different pines and spruces and I will show you how to identify them. 

This is a picture of a white pine, these trees can grow in a bunch of different ways in fields they are usually like this and a lot rounder then when they are found in the woods. This is because they have more space to grow and take advantage of it, they have evolved self pruning like many other pine trees, this is where if they do grow in the woods they lower branches die as they are pointless and would just waste energy, that is what make pines good for dry wood if you need a fire.

One way to identify the White pine and make sure it is not a red pine is that a White pine has a bundle of 5 needles as shown above. A red pine has a bundle of usually 3 but sometimes 2.  

This is a picture of a red pine they are more uncommon that of white pines but are still found through out central New York. The red pine is not as tall as the White pine but can get to 154 feet. The white pine used to be one of the tallest trees in the east measuring at 220 feet for average size but now there are hardly any that size as they were all cut down in order to have farms. 

This is a picture of the bark of a red pine. As you can see its is a brownish red color and is flaky this is an easy way to identify this tree.  

Happiness class entry

1) when do you feel most happy?
The times that I feel most happy is after completing a difficult physical or mental challenge.

2)React to the article
This article has some very interesting points on how to achieve happiness, most of which I agree with. When the author was talking about how if you start setting out goal for success you will most likely set the goals to high and not be able to complete them. This will cause the person the opposite of happiness as they feel that they have failed on a level, a point I can follow. I also agree with the chart that he made, where on one side is boredom and the other is stress, anxiety and that you have to have the right balance between being challenging yet still achievable.

3) Where are you on the flow chart?
I feel that right now on the flow chart I am between A3 and A4 so a little bit overwhelmed but not super overwhelmed. There is a lot of memorizing that I have been working on recently so I am feeling a bit stressed.

4) How has the changed throughout your project?
In the beginning it was very stressful trying to figure out where to setup the transect line have the excel sheets in order and now practicing identifying the flora and fauna is quite difficult. But once I am done with these aspects of the project I feel that I will have the perfect balance between challenge and boredom so making it to A 4 on the chart (the middle).

5) How can you achieve flow?
I can achieve flow by setting small achievable goals and by working on my project daily.