This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have the spindly, sprawling sprites of spring, the Crane Flies of genus Tipula.
Crane Flies are true flies and in the same lineage as Mosquitos, Midges, and Gnats. They belong to family Tipulidae and today I’m focusing primarily on the members of genus Tipula. Like all Flies, they’re a pain to identify to species, so we’ll just be looking at them generically. Crane Flies are found throughout the United States. They are large, lanky flies with a long abdomen, slender legs, and narrow wings. They can be found across a wide range of habitats, particularly forested areas, pastures, and residential areas with moist soils. Crane Flies are sometimes colloquially called “Skeeter-eaters” but don’t let that nickname fool you, they don’t eat mosquitoes. In fact, most adult Crane Flies don’t eat at all and those that do, drink nectar. They’re completely harmless but can be annoying when they slip into your house through an opened door and incessantly ram themselves against a lampshade while driving your cat mad. The adult Crane Fly only lives a few days. They instead spend much of their life as a subterranean larva and then emerge as adults only to reproduce. Adult Crane Flies fly throughout the year but notably are some of the earliest flying insects to emerge, sometimes cropping up in number during warm spells amid winter. The larvae of Crane Flies are detritivores who feed on the decaying organic matter on and within the surface of the soil and on the edges of wetlands. As detritivores and herbivores, they form an important link in the food web and in nutrient cycling. Crane Fly larvae are gray, leathery, and can grow over an inch long. Notably, the larvae of Tipula Crane Flies can become an agricultural and residential pest under certain conditions. The larvae live in lawns and pastures and will feed on the live roots of plants when decaying plant matter is scarce and they will even emerge from the ground at night to feed on the leaves and buds of turf grasses, clovers, and the like. Their midnight munching leaves behind burnt-looking patches of grass in lawns. However, Crane Fly larvae present more of an intermittent, seasonal issue when conditions are right, rather than a chronic pest.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have an evergreen ornament of the winter woods, Striped Wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata).
Striped Wintergreen is found throughout the Eastern United States and across South Carolina but is most common along the Appalachians. It’s a distant member of the Heath family, which includes Rhododendrons and Blueberries. It’s a very small, perennial plant rarely ever amounting to more than a three-inch stem and seven leaves. It’s found almost exclusively and ubiquitously in the deeply shaded forest floors of upland woodlands. Striped Wintergreen gets its name from its leaves, which are evergreen, oppositely arranged, leathery with a sparsely toothed margin, and colored a dark blue-green with a thick, pale stripe down the center. Further inland, it’s one of the few evergreen plants found below the winter woods and resembles few other plants in the southeast, making it very easy to find and identify. In late May, Striped Wintergreen begins to bloom. It produces a flower stalk that nearly triples the plant’s height to a miniscule 8-inches tall. This flower stalk is thin and straight, ending in a streetlight-shaped set of arches, each ending in a single flower. These five-petalled, pendulous white flowers curl open to create an inverted bowl and are pollinated primarily by bumblebees. Pollinated flowers mature to produce a dry fruit, which is held above the plant for several months more. Striped Wintergreen is not an ecosystem defining species nor is it a species that is integrally dependent on complex mutualistic relationships with its neighbors. It’s simply a species that has done quite well for itself, living a quiet life on its own accord between the shadows of giants.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have our intermediate icy-white egret, the Snowy Egret (Egretta thula).
The Snowy Egret is common year-round throughout the coastal plain of the Southern United States and also ventures further inland during the warmer months. Standing at roughly knee height, it’s pretty dead center in the size range of all our Egrets and Herons and has a lankier appearance than most. Their plumage is a uniform snow-white across its whole body but it can easily be differentiated from other white Herons and Egrets by its bill and legs. The Snowy Egret has a black bill with a patch of lemon-yellow skin in front of its equally yellow eyes. It also has black legs that end in bright-yellow feet. Both coloration combinations are unique for our local Egret species. The Snowy Egret is our most common Egret here on Edisto Island throughout much of the year. Like all Egrets and Herons, it’s an ambush hunter and, like most, it hunts fish, crustaceans, amphibians, and aquatic insects. Snowy Egrets are most often spotted patrolling the banks, shallows, lagoons, and marsh edges of our tidal creeks, shifting locations as the tides change. However, they can be found in a wide array of brackish and freshwater systems. Snowy Egrets tend to be more sedentary than some of our other medium-sized Egrets and will often be spotted posting up motionless at the mouths of small gullies, tributaries, and culverts. During spring, their breeding season begins and mature birds will disperse to large multi-species rookeries further inland. Breeding plumage Snowy Egrets will display delicate, long plumes from their back and elongated plume-like feathers from their head and throat. Their feet and eye-patch can also become orangey-pink. The plumes of the Snowy Egret were highly sought after for the millinery trade in the late 1800s, which resulted in huge population declines for the Snowy Egret and many other wading bird species. This severe market hunting pressure and species decline was one of the catalyzing factors for wildlife conservation laws in the early 1900s and resulted in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which prohibited the hunting of most of our native bird species and allowed Snowy Egret populations to fully recover to where they are today.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have a pair of tree species that help define some of our most iconic Lowcountry ecosystems, the Bays of genus Persea.
Here on Edisto Island we have two species of Bay, Redbay (Persea borbonia) and Swamp Bay (Persea palustris). Both species share many similar physical characteristics. However, the two species differ most notably in their habitats. Redbay is predominantly found in maritime forests on barrier islands and sparsely in maritime fringe forests on our sea islands on the wet but well-drained soils possible with our unique geology. Swamp Bay is found in stagnant, freshwater wetlands on acidic, poorly-drained soils. They are particularly abundant in Carolina bays and are the source that lent these isolated wetlands the “bay” name. They can also be differentiated by their twigs, with Redbay having smooth twigs and Swamp Bay having fuzzy twigs. Both teeter somewhere between a small tree and a large shrub, Swamp Bay tends to be more tree-like and Redbay shrubbier. Yet the two are more similar than different, in fact they were lumped together as one species until recent decades. Our Bays have somewhat blocky, light-gray bark and usually a gnarled or kinked stem. Their evergreen leaves are narrow but close to hand length with a glossy, dark-green upper surface. Both bloom in mid-spring with small pale yellow-green flowers and bear an egg-shaped dark-blue drupe. Both of our Bays are also the primary host plants for the Palamedes Swallowtail and can host the Spicebush Swallowtail too. The Avocado (P. americana) is a tropical member of the Bay genus but not native to the United States.
Our Bay trees are in trouble, particularly Redbay. Redbay has long been feeling the impacts of coastal development, as its barrier island and maritime fringe habitats have been rapidly developed over the last century. Swamp Bay has a much wider distribution and has been secure from such pressures. However, early in the 2000s an exotic pest carrying a pathogenic fungus was introduced from Asia and has been ravaging native populations of Bay trees since. A miniscule female Redbay Ambrosia Beetle locates a healthy Bay tree and bores a hole into its living wood. This beetle carries a pathogenic fungus called Laurel Wilt which is deposited by the beetle during the wood boring process. The beetle and the fungus have a symbiotic relationship. The beetle and its larvae feed on the fungus as it spreads throughout the tree and, in exchange, the fungus inoculates the beetles with spores and is spread deliberately and directly to the sapwood of new host trees by dispersing female beetles. The life cycle of the Redbay Ambrosia Beetle is fascinating but ultimately spells doom for infected Redbay and Swamp Bay trees, with infected stems dying within a matter of months. Infected trees can be identified by fine tubes of sawdust emerging from the trunk and dying trees are easily recognized by sudden wilting and browning of foliage across entire limbs or whole crowns. This disease affects not only our native Bay species but also other members of the Laurel family, including Sassafras, Spicebush, and Avocados. It is now becoming a serious economic threat to Avocado orchards in south Florida.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have our most diverse family of winter songbirds, the New World Sparrows of family Passerellidae.
Here in South Carolina there are about twenty-two species of New World Sparrows that one could reasonably expect to find somewhere in the state in a given year. However, we can whittle that down to about eleven species which one can readily find on Edisto Island. Sparrows as a whole are medium to small-sized songbirds with rather heavy triangular bills who feed primarily on seeds. They most often have cryptic, streaky plumages of browns, tans, grays, blacks, and whites. Their calls are generally short, sharp, and harsh and their songs high-pitched and clear. Most of our Sparrows our skittish and spend their lives in deep, brushy cover and thus are usually difficult to see. They are most plentiful and diverse in the winter months and there are almost always several individuals in any good habitat. I won’t go into all eleven common Lowcountry species today, which is a shame because there are a lot of interesting and rare sparrows one might run into out here with rather esoteric and nuanced field marks. (These confusing sparrow species are affectionately referred to as “LBJs”, little brown jobs, in the birding world.) Despite my desire for a skosh of brevity on this post, I will at least briefly cover our five most common and unique species of New World sparrow: Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia), Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina), White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis), Seaside Sparrow (Ammodramus maritimus), and Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus).
The Song Sparrow is what I would call our standard Sparrow. It’s about dead-center in the size range with fairly typical calls, songs, and habits. Its appearance is non-descript, highly varied, and well camouflaged but with discernable field marks. It’s also a generalist and very common, so it can be found in a wide range of habitats intermixed with other sparrow species. Thus, it’s a good standard by which to compare all our other sparrow species. Song Sparrows can be found in almost any grassy or brushy habitat and have a preference for ditches, wetland margins, and other edge habitats. Their plumage is primarily comprised of warm brown streaks on a gray back and white breast. It has a pale eyebrow, heavy flank streaks, and a prominent blob of brown smack in the center of its chest. The Song Sparrow’s most common call is short, loud, and a bit hoarse. It’s described less as a typical sparrow “chip” and more of a “chimp”. If you have a good ear, this call is more than enough to identify a Song Sparrow.
The Chipping Sparrow is our most numerous sparrow in suburban habitats and is also quite common in open pine savannas. They prefer sparse grassy areas and bare ground. They usually move in flocks of a dozen or more birds. They are one of our smallest sparrows and their plumage stands out for its simplicity. On top they have a rusty cap, prominent pale eyebrow, a dark eye-stripe, and a brindled back of black and warm-brown. Below, they are a uniform aluminum-gray. Chipping Sparrows are regular feeder birds and often saturate yard feeders all winter. Their call is a quiet and very high-pitched “chip” and their song a rapid-fire trill of high-pitched monotone notes.
The White-throated Sparrow is by far our most common woodland sparrow. They can be found in likely every upland brush pile, thicket, field edge, and clear-cut on the Island. They prefer to stay in deep cover whenever possible and can be difficult to get a good look at, but you can easily hear them chipping and scratching leaves from beneath. When you do lay eyes on one, they’re quite easy to identify. White-throated Sparrows are on the large side for a sparrow and sport some distinct facial markings: a snow-white throat, bright-white eyebrows, a dark cap with a pale line through it, and yolk-yellow patches just in front of the eyes. They also have an unmarked, pale-gray underside and a warm-brown back. Their song is flute-like and distinct and their calls high-pitched, often with an anxious or frantic intonation.
The Seaside Sparrow is notable for a few reasons. One, it’s one of our few resident species of sparrow that can be found here year-round and, two, it’s specially adapted for life in the salt marsh. The Seaside Sparrow can be found all throughout the salt marshes of Edisto Island and the Lowcountry, most often surrounding hammock islands, causeways, and upland margins. It feeds beneath the marsh grass and retreats to the high marsh on high tides or to hammock islands and marsh fringes during king-tides and storm surges. These birds are common but very skittish and difficult to see unless flushed at a high tide. In the winter their numbers are bolstered by migratory subspecies who come to snowbird alongside our resident Macgillivray’s subspecies. The Macgillivray’s Seaside Sparrow is a large sparrow with a notably short, ragged tail. Their plumage is distinctly a muddy dark gray with faint accents of neutral-browns and blacks. This is contrasted with a white throat and lemon-yellow patches in the eyebrows. Their songs and calls are somewhat non-descript and often difficult to hear in the field over the roar of the sea breeze, the rumble of boat motors, and the caterwauling of blackbirds and grackles.
The Eastern Towhee is our most standout sparrow in many regards. It’s our largest sparrow with a striking appearance, distinct calls and songs, and it’s a year-round resident of South Carolina. The Eastern Towhee can be found in a wide range of brushy habitats but has a preference for tall thickets and bushes that create a canopy of cover. They’re scratch feeders who root around for food beneath the leaf litter. Their appearance is unmistakable. Males sport an ink-black back, head, and breast and females the same but a mocha-brown. Their flanks are a solid rust-red and their belly a pure-white. White accents can also be spotted at the wrist of the wing and on the outside tail feathers. Most have a deep, blood-red eye but some coastal populations belong to a subspecies with a sharp, yellow eye. The song of the Eastern Towhee is an easily recognized “Drink-your-Tea” with the “tea” rolling into a trill. Their most common call is a namesake slurred “tow-hee”.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a popular flowering shrub with a two-faced existence, Common Lantana (Lantana camara).
Lantana is a genus of tropical, flowering shrubs in the Verbena family (Verbenaceae), which are native to the American tropics. Common Lantana, the species we’re focusing on today, which I’m just going to refer to as “Lantana”, is native to Central America and coastal South America. It’s not native to the United States but is naturalized to the Lowcountry. Common Lantana is a woody shrub with a round, dome-like growth habit. It’s very hardy and will tolerate drought, poor soil nutrition, and some salt intrusion. The bark of Lantana is flat and textured like sandpaper and colored a green-tinted tan. Stems can either be smooth or armed with prickles and irritating hairs. The leaves of Lantana are emerald green and spade-shaped with sunken veins and fine hairs. Lantana is a common ornamental here in the Southeast and comes in a wide array of varieties, hybrids, and cultivars. These cultivars differ primarily in their flower color but also in their size and vigor. Some cultivars can be quite large, reaching head height while others grow only knee high. Being a tropical plant, Lantana is not very cold hardy and will die back to its main trunk after a hard frost but will sometimes persist throughout our mild Sea Island winters. The flowers of Lantana are its most impressive feature. The flowers of different cultivars range in color from the vibrant gold and blood-orange of the more wild plants to the more contrasting lemon-yellow and hot-pink of some older varieties, to more modern white, yellow, and red cultivars. Apart from their ornamental value, Lantana is also a tremendous nectar plant for butterflies. Lantana will bloom from mid-spring clear until first frost and is a strongly preferred nectar plant by large and medium-sized butterflies. It’s also visited by hummingbirds and other nectar-seeking pollinators. The fruit of Lantana is a cluster of small, metallic blue-black berries. However, there’s another side to Lantana we don’t see often here on Edisto.
Common Lantana is an invasive species. It causes substantial economic and ecological damage in more tropical states, like Florida and Texas, where it robs nutrients from orchards, poisons livestock, chokes out native plants, and takes over grasslands. It has spread throughout the tropics of the world and causes significant ecological and agricultural damage in Africa, India, and Australia. However, here on Edisto Island and in the Lowcountry we are on edge of its naturalized range in the United States and our mild winters with consistent freezes keep Lantana from spreading rapidly and forming thickets in the state, except for open areas on our barrier islands and other edge cases. In this limited capacity, it does displace native Barrier Island species but at the same time it also has a somewhat balancing benefit to native wildlife. On the mainland it rarely causes issues in our Lowcountry ecosystems.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s our other mud-loving, tidal bivalve, the Atlantic Ribbed Mussel (Geukensia demissa).
Atlantic Ribbed Mussels live throughout our tidal estuaries on Edisto Island. They range in size up to four inches in length and have a thin-walled, sandal-shaped shell that’s a dark-green-brown and striped with fine, longitudinal ribs. Ribbed Mussels inhabit the low saltmarsh, attaching themselves as larvae to base of Smooth Cordgrass stalks. Overtime, many coalesce and grow into small clusters and, as they grow larger, they can bury themselves partially in the pluff-mud. Unlike Oysters and Barnacles, Atlantic Ribbed Mussels don’t permanently join their shells to the structure they attach to. Instead, these Mussels grow flexible fibers from the rear of their shell that can glue it to grass, wood, shell, or rock. If they become dislodged, they can reattach themselves to a new surface. Mussels are filter feeders, just like Oysters, and play an important role in filtering run-off, sequestering pollutants, and stabilizing sediment in our saltmarshes. However, Ribbed Mussels don’t get the recognition they deserve due to their invisibility, as it’s hard to notice a brown mollusk half buried in mud, submerged in saltwater, underneath a great expanse of grass. Also they don’t get much press because they’re not a culinary delicacy. Atlantic Ribbed Mussels are edible but hard to collect and not always safe to eat. They’re generally risky to eat in the modern world due to their ability to sequester chemical pollutants filtering through the saltmarsh. Also, even in pristine waters, it’s recommended to harvest them only at hide-tide, given that they can concentrate waste and environmental toxins inside their watertight shell during low-tide. Given all those caveats, I think we’re better off leaving the Mussels be and enjoying the other bounties of the sea. They’ve got an important job to do.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a genus of common woodland mushrooms with a dark side, the Amanitas.
Amanitas are one of the prototypical fungi we conjure up in our heads when someone says the word “mushroom”. It’s a diverse genus with over a hundred species found in North America. I’m far from a fungus fanatic, so I’m mostly going to stay at a general genus level today. Amanitas’ fruiting bodies, what we lay folk call mushrooms, are agaric in shape. Agaric mushrooms have a prominent and distinctly separate cap with gills held up by a stalk, AKA a toadstool. The size, shape, texture, and color of Amanita mushrooms varies greatly. Many have caps that are white or are a pale-beige but others can be a vibrant red or yellow or conversely a muted brown, gray, or peach. Their texture can be scaly, warty, ribbed, or smooth. Yet in general, the Amanita cap tends to be broad and nearly flat and the stalk is usually lightly-colored, tall, and narrow but not delicate. The stalks also commonly have a skirt under the cap, called an annulus, which is the remains of the membrane that protected the gills during emergence. Amanita mushrooms emerge throughout the year, depending on local habitat conditions and the phenology of different species, but they can most commonly be seen in fall and early winter.
The members of the Amanita genus are all ectomycorrhizal, meaning they join into mutualistic relationships with plants, predominantly trees, by forming a sheath around the plant’s roots underground. The fungus provides the plant with extra nutrients it scoured from the soil and the tree helps feed the fungus in exchange for the salvage work. Due to how common Amanitas are and the significance of mycorrhizal relationships in forest ecology, this genus plays a critical role in keeping our forests healthy. Many species of wildlife also feed on Amanitas and other mushrooms, including squirrels, deer, mice, box turtles, feral hogs, and black bear.
Some species of Amanita are edible for humans as well. However, many Amanita species are far from edible and the genus contains several of the deadliest fungi known to science. The Eastern North American Destroying Angel (Amanita bisporigera) is the most toxic mushroom native to the United States and found in forests throughout South Carolina. Its mushrooms are a smooth, uniform, colorless white. The Death Cap (Amanita phalloides) is native to Europe but has established throughout the United States through the transplanting of tree rootstocks. It is responsible for the majority of all fatal mushroom poisonings globally. The Death Cap mushroom is relatively large in size with a smooth, brass colored cap. Eating either of these two Amanita species causes liver failure. There are other toxic Amanita species as well. Many of the edible species look very similar to the toxic ones, so it is strongly recommended, by practically everyone, that if you have an interest in foraging for edible mushrooms, that all Amanitas be avoided unless you are absolutely, 100% certain of your identification.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re serenaded by a trio of tongue-twisted songbirds, the Mimics of family Mimidae.
Here in South Carolina we have three species of Mimic, the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), the Brown Thrasher (Toxostoma rufum), and the Gray Catbird (Dumetella carolinensis). The trio are common in the Lowcountry and can be found across Edisto Island all year-round. All three are on the larger side for songbirds, subsist off a diet of primarily invertebrates and fruits, often move and feed on the ground, and can mimic the calls of other birds. However, each has its own seasonality, habitat preference, personality, and vocal repertoire.
The Northern Mockingbird is by far our most easily seen mimic. They are non-migratory and territorial. Their plumage is a subtle selection of silvery-white, aluminum-gray, and charcoal-black with a brass-yellow eye. The Mockingbird prefers open, cleared habitat and is an accomplished generalist. They’ve taken well to farmland, clear-cuts, suburbs, and urban parks where we keep the grass low and ringed with shrubs, just how they like it. They can often be spotted running along the ground catching bugs or perched atop a palmetto, street light, roof eave, tree limb, or anywhere that’s ten to twenty feet up. Males are particularly territorial and spend much of their time singing away their own custom mixtape of remixed bird songs sampled from the neighborhood or screeching and fighting with other birds. Mockingbirds are our most adept at mimicry and can flawlessly imitate the calls of many species. However, they generally don’t mimic the entire call and repeat the same phrase three or more times in a row before switching subjects. The call of the Mockingbird is a sharp, harsh sound like someone sucking their teeth. Mockingbirds are also especially feisty when it comes to threats and are religious about their harassment of hawks, owls, snakes, and house cats that intrude on their turf.
The Brown Thrasher is our largest bodied Mimic. They’re about as common as the Mockingbird in rural areas but their numbers increase in winter as some Thrashers migrate south. The Brown Thrasher is a warm rusty-brown up top contrasted by an eggshell-white breast seasoned by walnut-brown spots and a piercing yolk-yellow eye. They prefer brushy, forested habitats and are much harder to spot in the wild because of it. Brown Thrashers spend much of their time foraging in the leaf litter under dense brush and thickets, particularly Azaleas in residential settings. They’re most easily spotted scratching along the ground or singing way up high in the tree canopy, some thirty to forty foot off the ground. The Brown Thrasher is a decent mimic but their renditions tend to be a bit raspy, cut-short, and low-fidelity, and are usually repeated just one to two times before changing. The call of our Thrasher is that same suck-tooth sound like the Mockingbird but a touch shorter and raspier.
The Gray Catbird is the smallest of the three and the most seasonal. In summer, they are our scarcest Mimic but during winter and over migration they are overwhelmingly our most common. The Gray Catbird is a bluish to phosphate-gray across much of its body with a charcoal-black cap and tail-tip, walnut-brown under-tail, and a nearly black eye. The Gray Catbird is found in dense, wet, brushy habitats like the fringes of saltmarsh, freshwater marshes, field ditches, windrows, thickets, clear-cuts, and brush piles. Catbirds stay low to the ground and rarely leave cover. They’re curious but shy, often moving out to the edges of shrubs to investigate but disappearing back out of sight after a few seconds. Gray Catbirds don’t so much mimic as take inspiration from the world around them. They don’t usually repeat phrases and those phrases and notes are only sometimes reminiscent of other species. The call of the Catbird is a unique and unmistakable begging “meow” of a cat, albeit a cat that sounds a little hoarse.
