Who did what? Part One
Have you ever wondered, strolling through the Yukon bush with your pup, at the mysterious horizontal markings between the bark of trees? Here are a few explanations for some wild and weird sights.
Birds and trees
Your nice neighbour has a snow machine and is keeping up with grooming the trails behind your house, after a heavy snowfall, so that you can ski them at your leisure. That’s where you come upon a spot with dropped spruce cones and think What in the world? They’re just in that one spot … What gives?
Look for conifers with a very-brown-looking top, an indication of many cones. The white-winged crossbills will be busy scurrying between the branches, picking out the spruce cone seeds, not afraid to hang upside down to do this work, either, and in the process dropping one or more cones (oops).
On your next outing you notice that someone or something has attacked a spruce tree; all around it, on top of the snow, lay little brown chips or flakes of bark. Enter the three-toed woodpecker who attacks the bark to find out if a tasty bug is hiding behind it. The bird hops round and round so that the tree ends up with nice horizontal lines void of bark. I see many tree holes around here and wonder if the woodpecker needs to have a new dig every year.
Our very-cute pine grosbeaks stick around until there are hardly any highbush cranberries left. I better step up my game next fall, as I went out too late in the season and didn’t even get an ice-cream bucket full of them “pearls.” Now you know who loves eating highbush cranberries. Rosy pieces of berry skin and seeds will be scattered all around the plant, with bird tracks visible.
Yes, we have bats!
A very cool thing is to have bats in camp. We didn’t realize it, though, until a couple of years later. Each summer, getting back to the line, the inside of the workshop smelled a little bit “shitty” and pee-like (imagine ammonia). Poo the size of rice kernels was observed. Turns out there were little brown bats between the log structure’s wall and some slats (off we go to build a bat house).
First we attached it onto “their” wall outside, but higher up. They weren’t interested. Then we nailed it onto a pole to the outhouse, where a few of them were being wedged between the slats and a sheet of poly. No luck. Something didn’t jive, so they’ve never claimed it as their abode. For years now, every summer, we have had a “roost” (a roost is a group of bats who are all females) of maybe 30 of them between the tarps of a shed’s roof. They’d scuttle into the shadows when hearing us approach. No question: it was pretty neat to see the little brown myotis doing her job (hunting mosquitoes) into the wee hours of the midnight sun. The bats flee the approaching chilly nights for warmer climates, to then sleep out the winter in caves.
Who else makes a mess?
Enter the Yukon’s tree rat, a.k.a. the red squirrel. Where there are older trees with many brown cones adorning or even weighing down the conifer’s top end, these rodents enjoy living there at their food source. Look for holes in the snow and cone debris. Hiding spots are fallen dead trees zigzagging the forest floor, covered by two feet of snow.
The boots in your line cabin, filled with ugly-looking, half-dried mushrooms, will tell you once more to put them someplace safe and to make that cabin squirrel-proof. Outside the house, you might see a mushroom nicely placed in a tree branch—another “pantry” spot for squirrels. I wonder if they remember all the places they’ve stashed their nourishment.
Maybe the bush’s “alarm system” (a squirrel barking at an intruder that’s maybe not you but a bear that’s 20 metres away) is watching you right now from the safe, high vantage point of a witch’s broom.
Such broom-looking sightings are found on spruce trees. They’re dense, ball-shaped clusters of twigs that look like a broomstick in the branches. They become a welcome shelter for squirrels, as well as nesting spots for boreal chickadees.
There are three different reasons why a witch’s broom might develop:
- rust fungi, causing a light mass of shoots
- dwarf mistletoe: parasites that distort a branch’s growth
- genetic mutations or insect damage
Where is the “pig”?
Now, the woodpecker looks for food under tree bark, but the porcupine (whose name comes from the French porc–éspin, or “thorny pig”) eats that bark. Last fall I scrambled up a little incline because I wanted to check out the spot of boulders that I had seen from below. Now with all these droppings!
Clearly a porcupine lives there … It seems it wants to conserve energy by eating the bark and cambium off all of the spruce and pine trees in the vicinity. In summertime, this funny-looking, waddling rodent loves to eat leaves and flowers.
It would be cute to see a porcupine eating a dandelion … (to be continued in Part 2).
Sonja Seeber, Yukon trapper
