My World

Welcome to my submission for the second edition of that's My World and welcome to Wood Lake Nature Center.

Wood Lake is like a small oasis in the middle of a suburban metropolitan area. Located in Richfield, MN, which is a southern suburb of Minneapolis, the Wood Lake Nature Center sits on 150 acres of natural habitat.

At Wood Lake's Interpretive Center naturalist answer questions from the approximately 72,000 visitors that they get in a year. They also provide educational programs for both kids and adults.
Wood Lake also has many events through out the year. Many of these events are centered around a holiday or season. Outdoor events are often held at the small amphitheater that is located outside the Interpretive Center.

The main reason that I like to visit Wood Lake is because of the wildlife. I usually begin right outside the back of the Interpretive Center. This are is open and is filled with natural Minnesota plants and wild flowers.

This prairie type of habitat attracts many different types of insects such as grasshoppers and butterflies. This least skipper is drinking nectar from a wildflower.

It is also great habitat for dragonflies, like this common green darner. Dragonflies are predators and are always on the hunt for other insects.

All of the bugs that are around attract insect eating birds. Barn swallows, like the one above, frequently nest under the eves of the Interpretive Center. The vast number of insects around help them be more successful in raising their families. Tree swallows are also prevalent during the warm months but they prefer the larger open fields on the west side of the park.

The park is not all open field. There are wooded areas, with trails running through them, all around the Nature Center.

These wooded areas are good places to see warblers and other types of passerines that live in wooded habitat. Palm warblers, above, are usually found near the ground looking for insects.

Orange-crowned warblers find their prey higher up in the trees. I often see them scouring the branches for bugs living on them.

Yellow-rumped warblers are usually the most common warbler around. They frequently hunt by catching insects in the air.

Birds are not the only wildlife in the woods. I have seen squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, muskrat, fox and deer inside the park.

At the center of the Nature Center is Wood Lake. Wood Lake is a shallow lake that runs most of the length of the park. Several of the paths cross over the lake either by bridge or by boardwalk. This helps visitors to get a better look at this wetland habitat and all of the wildlife living in it.

Ducks are the most common wildlife on the lake. Wood duck boxes have been placed through out the park to promote nesting by these colorful ducks.

Hooded mergansers often compete with the wood ducks for the nesting boxes. Females are usually around through out the summer, often giving visitors a treat when they bring their young out on to the lake.

The male hoodies are usually only around during the breeding season. Once the females have legged the eggs the males head off and leave the females to incubate the eggs and care for the young.

There is also life living under the water, algae, and lilly pads. Fish swim in the lake as do many insects. Frogs and snakes live in the water and around the shore of the lake. Logs floating in the lake become islands where turtles go to sun themselves and increase their body temperature.

I hope that you enjoyed my virtual tour of Wood Lake Nature Center and that if you ever get the chance, you decide to pay them a visit. If you would like more information please check out their website.

Fun Bugs at Wood Lake

Over the past couple years I have spent a lot of time in fields. I walk through the grasses and wild flowers in search of interesting wildlife to take pictures of. Often I am surrounding by the buzzing of bees as they move from bloom to bloom but never while I have been out photographing insects in the field have I ever been stung. Unfortunately I can not say the same thing as far as being in my truck driving home from work.

Last fall as I got into my truck to come home from work I was stung on my arm by a yellow jacket. That was nothing though compared to this year. Yesterday I was on my way home from work, driving down the freeway when I felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder blade. Right away I thought that I had been stung but since I was on a freeway I could not stop. I leaned forward in my car seat and began to feel around for the culprit. I found nothing. I began to wonder if it was not just a nerve spike that sometimes I get as a diabetic, although usually in my arms, hands, feet or legs, especially since I had not heard any buzzing and I had been driving for over 15 minutes before the pain started. I began to relax and since the initial pain was diminishing began to slowly sit back. That was when I felt another shot of pain. Fortunately I was getting off the freeway and only a few minutes from home so I drove the rest of the way home leaning forward. When I got home I took off my shirt off right away and ran to the mirror to take a look. Sure enough there were 3 sting marks on my back but I still did not know what happened to the bee. That was until I shook my shirt out a bit and out fell a yellow jacket.

Maybe I should look into getting a bee keepers suite to keep me safe on my drive home.
In the fields I will just keep wearing jeans and a tee shirt because out there the bees, like the one above, are more interested in collecting pollen and nectar then they are stinging me. This bee is pretty loaded up with pollen, you can see the full orange pollen sack on its leg.
I was kind of excited to get these next couple of pics. Not because the red milkweed beetle is a rare insect that is difficult to find but instead because one of the guys that I work with went to college down in Austin, Texas and he is a big Texas Longhorn fan.
These beetles lay their eggs at the base of the milkweed plant. When the eggs hatch the larvae bore into the milkweed stem. They will spend the winter as larvae down in the roots. In the spring they will pupate and emerge as adults early in the summer. The adults usually can be found eating milkweed leaves, the toxicity of which make the red milkweed beetle a distasteful morsel to most predators.
The mourning cloak butterfly, on the other hand, is one of the few butterflies that over winters as an adult, in the northern portions of its range. This butterfly hibernates in suspended animation in a sheltered location over the winter. During this time the mourning cloak secretes chemicals like sorbital into their bodies which act as a natural antifreeze and prevent ice crystals from forming inside the butterfly.
This last picture is I believe a moth but I have no idea what kind. I am hoping that maybe some of the people over at bugguide.net, who I invited to come and take a look at the blog, can give me some idea as to what type of moth that this is. If you think that you might have an idea please post a comment to this post.

Dragonflies at Wood Lake Nature Center

Wood Lake Nature Center is located in the heart of Richfield, MN, which is a southern suburb of Minneapolis. The lake itself is very shallow and has to be dredged in the past. These are pretty good conditions for dragonflies so I am always on the look out while I am there for some dragon pics.
Back in the middle of July I found a few dragons. The first one, pictured above, is a great face shot but the angle makes it difficult for me to ID it. Maybe if I had some more experience I would not have problems but this is only my second summer photographing dragons. I believe that it may be a juvenile female blue dasher but I am not 100% sure. The juvenile females are brown with yellow markings on the thorax and abdomen. As the male and female age their abdomen turns blue with pruinose.
This dragon is definitely a male twelve-spotted skimmer. We know that he is male because the pattern of the spots on the wings as well as the white spots, which the females do not have. He has probably been around for a while because his abdomen has turned blue with pruinosity.
This female widow skimmer also looks like she has been around a while, at least in dragonfly terms which is measured in days or possibly weeks. You can see the age in her wings. The male widow skimmer has white bands on the wings located just outside the black patches at the base.

Birding Wood Lake Nature Center

After spring migration most of the good birding here where I live, consists of photographing the remaining bird while they nest or raise their young. While there is certainly not the variety that we get during the spring migration, this time allows us birders to take a closer glimpse at some of the more intimate behavior of our feathered friends. In mid July I spent some time at Wood Lake Nature Center watching the birds and their behavior.
There is always a good population of swallows at Wood Lake during the summer. This population consists of both tree and barn swallows. The tree swallows often take up residence in the bluebird boxes which are located on the prairie on the western portion of the park. The barn swallows like to build nests under the eaves of the visitors center, located at the east side of the park. The barn swallow nest, as shown above, is made of mud pellets, which are collected in the birds beak, and lined with grass. Barn swallows will nest in colonies, with each pair defending a space around its nest, if there is sufficient nesting space.
By July the wood duck males had already lost most of their breeding plumage. These ducks typically pair off while still on their winter range, in January, and return as a pair to the breeding range. The male will stay with the female through the breeding season but then find a new mate the next year. In the southern part of their range wood ducks will frequently produce two broods per season. Wood ducks are cavity nesters and will nest in large holes in trees, frequently made by piliated woodpeckers, although any cavity that is large enough will do. Since there is often a lack of natural cavities, wood ducks will often use man made nesting boxes, like the ones that are placed all around Wood Lake.
The female will line the cavity, or nesting box with down from her own body to make a soft feather bead for the clutch of typically 6 to 15 eggs, although if wood ducks nest to close together they will often deposit eggs into the nest of a neighboring female. These "dump nests" as they are called can contain up to 40 eggs. After they hatch the young chicks must jump from the nest and follow mom, who does not help them, down to the water.
Another type of duck that sometimes use the nesting boxes are hooded mergansers. The hoodies nest very much the same way that the wood ducks do, in a cavity that is lined with downy feathers from the female. The hoody babies are learning how to dive for their food, fish, bugs and crustaceans. They can adjust the refractiveness of their eyes allowing them to have better underwater vision. They also have an almost clear nictitating membrane, second eye lid that birds and some animals posses, which helps protect their eyes while they are under water. The wood ducks just have to learn to dabble across the surface poking their bills under the water in search of seeds, vegetation, bugs and other invertebrates.

Woodlake Turtles

One of the big threats to dragonfly and damselfly comes from the turtles that live in the shallow waters of Wood Lake.
Fossil records indicate that the earliest know turtles existed around 215 million years, making turtles one of the oldest existing species on earth. Today there are about 300 different species of turtles in the world and they range in size from the spekled padloper tortoise, 3 inches long and weighing 5 oz, to the leatherback sea turtle, 80 inches long and weighing 2000lbs. Of the 300 different species of turtles in the world there are approximately 60 or so different types of turtles in North America. In Minnesota we only have around 10 types. The turtles in these pictures are the most common type that we see in Minnesota, the painted turtle.
The painted turtle, sometimes called a "mud Turtle" in my neck of the woods, is named for the bright colored pattern on the belly, otherwise called a plastron, of the turtle. They are semi-aquatic, spending most of their time in the waters of ponds, lakes, or slow moving rivers with muddy bottoms, although they can frequently be seen sitting on floating logs or rocks in the sun. This behavior is called basking and it is a way for the turtles to generate heat because they are cold blooded and can not regulate their own body temperatures internally. Turtles are omnivores and will eat almost anything that they can get into their mouths. This includes insects like our friends the dragonflies.

Woodlake Butterflies

The next morning I decided to check out Woodlake Nature Center to see what wildlife I could photograph. I found some more early morning butterflies to shoot.
This least skipper was unusually cooperative which is good because I was photographing it with a 400mm lens. This means that I had to be about 4 to 5 feet away and had to use manual focus.
In this picture it is easy to see the proboscis inserted into the flower which the butterfly uses like a straw to drink nectar.
I also found a mourning cloak butterfly. Mourning cloaks have the longest life span of any butterfly in North America.
The mourning cloak is one of only a hand full of butterflies that overwinters in its adult butterfly form. When winter comes the mourning cloak will find a sheltered spot, somewhere like a crevice of a tree or building, where it will spend most of the winter in a state of suspended animation to conserve energy. To prevent their bodies from freezing the produce chemicals, such as sorbitol, which act as a natural antifreeze. When the weather begins to warm up the mourning cloaks come to life, as early as March some years in my area of the world. Shortly after, dependent on the weather, they will mate, lay eggs and then their life cycle will be complete after 10 to 11 months of life.

Hoodies Gone Wild at Wood Lake

There are three types of mergansers that can typically be found in North America. The smallest of the three is the hooded merganser. The hooded merganser is also the only one of the three that can be only be found in North America.
I typically see hoodies around home during spring or fall migration. I sometimes even see them during the winter, in the few spots where the water stays open. Even though we are considered part of their breeding range, most hoodies seem to continue on past the cities up to Northern Minnesota, North Dakota, or Canada. That is why I was kind of surprised to see a small group of females when I visited Wood Lake Nature Center in mid June.

It should not surprise me to find them at Wood Lake because it would seem to be the right breeding habitat. According to what I have read, thanks Cornell Lab for all the great info, the breeding habitat is forested wetlands, which is a good description for Wood Lake.

Wood Lake is a fairly shallow lake, hoodies prefer shallower waters then other mergansers.
The north and south sides of the lake are lined with woods. There are quite a few older trees which are quite large and which provide cavities for the hoodies to nest in.
If there are no tree cavities available for them to nest in, then there are several wood duck boxes placed around the park that can act as a substitute.
Although the lake is shallow, it is deep enough for the hoodies to dive under water to hunt the fish, and aquatic insects living there.

As you can see in the pics it is also deep enough for the hoodies to splash around and get a little rowdy.

Must of been one of those girls gone wild things because I did not see any males around.

Wood Lake Surprise

I finally found a way that nature photography could be lucrative.
While out at Wood Lake Nature Center last month I found a couple of bucks.

LOL

Swallows at Wood Lake Nature Center

There always seems to be a healthy population of swallows at Wood Lake Nature Center during the warmer months of the year.
Barn swallows, like the one pictured above, can often be seen circling around the visitors center. They build their nests in the eaves and other nooks and crannies of the building.
Tree swallows, like this one, are more often found on the other end of the park. They prefer to nest in the bluebird boxes which are placed in the open fields on the west side of the park.
Both types of swallows will often perch on the cables, which serve as a railing for the boardwalk which runs across the lake in the middle of the park. From their perch, over the water, they can easily take off and catch flying insects as they pass by, which is their main source of food.