Strawberry Pollinators - Flower Flies

 

All manner of flies are attracted to the early-season nutrition of strawberry flowers. Some of these insects are tiny enough to roam within the 5/8" flower realm.

Gonia sagax, Parasitic Fly

Others, seen eye to eye, look more imposing.

Bombylius major, Great Bee Fly

One species of fly hovers like a miniature hummingbird as it draws in nectar through a long proboscis. Its resemblance to a bumblebee must offer some protection from predators.

Platycheirus sp., - Sedgesitter Fly

The diverse Syrphid family known as the Hover Flies characteristically hold a stationary position in midair while deciding on their next move.

Syritta pipiens - Thick-legged Hover Fly

Strawberry flowers suit them perfectly because, like most flies, and unlike the bee fly, their sucking mouthparts cannot probe into tube-like corollas.

Anasimyia anausis, Moon-shaped Swamp Fly

In this pollination match, syrphid flies come into the world with a strong preference for white and yellow flowers.

Eupeodes americanus, American Hover Fly

Syrphid flies are frequent flower visitors to a wide range of wild plants, as well as agricultural crops, and are often considered the second-most important group of pollinators after wild bees. (Wikipedia)

Toxomerus marginatus, Margined Calligrapher

Their functional association with flowers adds delightful dimensions of form, flight, and pattern to the natural history observer's appreciation of microcosmic life.

Strawberry Pollinators - The Bees

 

Lasioglossum, subgenus Dialictus,  Metallic-Sweat Bee

Perhaps because strawberry flowers bloom early in the year while it's still cool, almost all the bees I've seen foraging among them have been wild, native species as distinct from the imported, though sometimes naturalized, Honey Bees, which become more active at temperatures above 55 degrees.

Colletes inaequalis, Unequal Cellophane Bee

It would also make sense that these flora and fauna have a preferential relationship, the native bees' tastes, habits, and mouthparts having co-evolved with the structure, timing, and nutritional offerings of this particular flower.

Ceratina sp., Small Carpenter Bee

The strawberry flowers are only five-eighths to three-quarters of an inch across. You can see that many of these native species are tiny creatures that, to the casual eye, might not be recognized as bees at all as they flit quietly through the vegetation.

Nomada sp., Nomad Bee

Other than honey bees and bumble bees, which are considered 'social' because they live cooperatively with individuals developing specialized tasks that support the colony, native species are solitary bees in the sense that every female is fertile, and typically inhabits a nest she constructs herself. There is no division of labor so these nests lack queens and workers. Solitary bees typically produce neither honey nor beeswax, but they do collect pollen to feed their young.

Augochlorini, Green-Sweat Bee

According to a U. S. Department of the Interior website, about 20%-45% of native bees are pollen specialists, meaning that they use only pollen from one species (or genus) of plants. If that plant is removed, the bee goes away. If bees are removed, the plant doesn't reproduce.

Apis mellifera, Western Honey Bee

This is the only honey bee I noticed investigating a strawberry flower. It is considerably larger than the native species, with body parts more adapted to transporting both pollen and nectar home to its brood, and to the domestic harvest of human beekeepers.

Spring Portraits

The main migration of birds through Halibut Point must be only days away. There have been occasional delights over the past month.

Palm Warbler

Golden-crowned Kinglet

Carolina Wren

American Goldfinch

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

Red-breasted Mergansers

Eastern Towhee

Strawberry Flowers

 

Woodland Strawberry, Fragaria vesca

Wild strawberries have been blooming sensibly this week in a sheltered glade at Halibut Point where unseasonable weather elements are tempered by wind-breaking trees around a sun-drenched meadow. The flowers presage the pea-sized red fruit that they engender with the help of pollinators on these stems, in late spring or early summer.

Syrphid Fly, Toxomerus marginatus

All manner of insects great and small have hatched or come out of hibernation for their first meal as adults.

Syrphid Fly, Neoascia species

Most of the visitors are Lilliputians on flowers that are only five-eighths of an inch across.

Ants clambering across the stamens looks relatively titanic,

although some miniscule species are scarcely noticeable on the edge of a petal.

Parasitic Fly, Tachinidae

A creature with the proportions of an ordinary house fly looks imposing on one of these flowers.

Ground Beetle, Lebia viridis

Flitting, hovering, crawling, the emergent insects come forth with remarkable features, specializations, and appetites.

Lasioglossum species

Many of the tiny wild bees are classified in the largest of all bee genera, Lasioglossum, highly variable in size, coloration, and sculpture. In one form or another they are the most frequently encountered bees on Halibut Point.

Metallic Sweat Bee, Lasioglossum

This bee is about 3/8" long. The fly below it burrowing into the flower corolla, though miniscule, has all the working parts and functions of familiar insects. 

All the strawberry flowers are facing south, which makes an orderly business for the photographer and keeps the warm sun on his back during motionless vigils. The over-the-shoulder light makes for nice illumination, though it requires care not to cast alarming shadows toward the insect. The best approach is at an oblique angle, steadying and focusing the camera from a yogi master crouch.

Right Whales

One day last week when Kay and I encountered our regular birding friend Ann at the Park entrance, she reported seeing a right whale off the tip of Halibut Point. The whale seemed lethargic and was probably still close by. Don was out at the grout pile monitoring the situation. They were concerned that it might be entangled in fishing gear. We congratulated her on the sighting and hurried on to what we hoped would be our first glimpse of a right whale, a once-common creature in the Seven Seas that was hunted nearly to extinction.

Rockport Harbormaster arriving,
Crane Beach and Ipswich in the background

We found Don at the grout pile as he was guiding the Rockport Harbormasters to the scene by cell phone from the promontory. Scott and Rosemary had made quick time over from Town to assess the whale's situation and relay its position to the monitoring agencies that track and rescue endangered marine mammals. 

The Harbormasters confirmed that this was a right whale, but did not notice any entanglements that might be impeding its movement. They passed the word on to the U. S. Coast Guard station in Gloucester, to the NOAA Whale Center, and to the Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF). All news about this species is valued as the whales move north in their spring migration.

The pair of whales skim feeding in Ipswich Bay
Rockport Harbormaster photo

As they watched another whale joined the first. Clearly the two were communicating at considerable distance through the water. They continued swimming languidly at the surface, their exhale spouts much smaller than if they had been deep diving.

Right whale

This (to us) unexpected floating behavior called for investigation on the website of the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. I found that the peculiarities of this animal's appearance and activity match perfectly, form and function correlating in another of the natural world's splendid evolutions. The right whale's enormous mouth houses a forest of baleen that filters miniscule zooplankton from the water in quantities prodigious enough to sustain its great bulk. The large paddle-shaped fins and tail help it drift through concentrations of these organisms, gulping and straining the microscopic prey. To accomplish this the whale's great head may compose a third of its body length. Those languid movements were its normal surface feeding pattern.

Right whale during the month of March in Cape Cod Bay
Photo from the Center for Coastal Studies website

A DMF spotter plane was soon overhead identifying the whales and plotting their movements north from Cape Cod Bay through the hazards of entanglement with fishing gear and collisions with vessels in shipping lanes. The highly individualized patterns of white callused skin allows monitors to name and monitor each individual. The spotters also provide information that can shape conservation restrictions while the whales are concentrated in particular areas. 

Photographed from above in its natural environment the whale takes on a rightfully graceful look impossible to compose in the drawing.

Song Sparrow

 

The musical utterances of birds are so tied to their rhythms of increase that they produce a sense of wellbeing also in the human ear, particularly with the lengthening of our days when a sense of new life abounds.

Small numbers of song sparrows have been with us all winter, not very conspicuously, as they don't visit elevated bird feeders. They find what they need almost entirely on the ground, usually along brushy edges. You're likely to see them at (their) safe distance along the roadside margins and meadows of Halibut Point almost any time of year. 

You have to get close to enjoy the variegated browns, russets, and grays that mark a Song Sparrow. Its great distinction is the chest striping that converges to a black shield.

Song Sparrows are winter gleaners. They scratch and forage for vegetative bits wherever an absence of snow cover allows.

To see one hunting for weed seeds in the windswept barrens of the grout pile is to admire one of nature's resilient adaptations.

Come spring and the nutritional demands of parenting, Song Sparrows are able to widen their diet to include insects.

Summer landscapes offer many sorts of sustenance. Male sparrows take to high perches to establish family territories.

Their cheery calls in almost any corner of the Park form a counterpoint in the avian chorus of caws, squawks, and chatter. Close observers of the Song Sparrow, and of course the birds themselves, recognize meaningful variations in its colorful repertoire of songs built around a core pattern that suggests:

-an opening assertion ONE, TWO, THREE

-an ascending, sustained buzzing trill

-a clear, exultant yodel I AM, I AM, I AM.

Keep an eye and ear toward promontories on the moors of Halibut Point for the sweet assertions of these energetic soloists.

Departing Ducks

 

Red-breasted Merganser pair

Their extravagance is my thought, not theirs. Certainly it's not a choice. The fancy plumage and courtship behavior, the enormity of migration, are written into every duck's genetic code.

Long-tailed Duck and two Harlequin males

Over the winter season the drakes of many duck species have become adorned with spectacular mating plumage.

Harlequin Duck pair

The courtship activity of Harlequin Ducks often features short dashes by the male toward a flighty female.

Buffleheads, a drake and three hens

This male Bufflehead appears to be well situated as spring ardor unfolds.

Bufflehead female dashing at the male

Inexplicably to an observer, one of the females charges the male. Whether her flurry signals affection, consternation, or some other impulse is understood only in the realm where it matters.

Common Loon, Folly Cove

This male loon's plumage has sharpened into the classic pattern seen in summer on inland lakes. 

Loon pair, female (l) and male (r)

A bit of seductive yodeling has brought the pair together for an intricate display of water ballet.

Horned Grebe

After a shoreline winter in very subdued plumage this male Horned Grebe is properly attired for a lakeside rendezvous at its breeding destination in western Canada or Alaska.