Field Work

Ohio Dragonfly Survey – Spring Training 2018

Last Thursday, MaLisa Spring, state coordinator of the Ohio Dragonfly Survey, gave the introduction to a series of talks about dragonflies and damselflies, how to identify them (Bob Glotzhober), how to photograph them (Jim McCormac) and how to report them on iNaturalist (Jim Lemon).

The audience was captivated by stories such as dragonflies being ferocious hunters, some have even been reported to prey on hummingbirds (albeit rarely).

On the other hand, watching dragonflies glide over open water on a warm summer day can be very peaceful and give us appreciation for their beauty and flying ability.

Bob Glotzhober even speculated that the origin of the shape of the Valentine’s heart can be found in the mating ritual of some dragonflies. What do you think?

So how does one identify a dragonfly?

And how do you distinguish a dragonfly from a damselfly?

But be careful, size is not the only difference and may be deceiving: in the tropics some damselflies grow to 7 inches in length!

If you want to learn more about dragonflies, visit the Ohio Dragonfly Survey website or attend the Odonata conference in June 22-24 2018 in Findlay, Ohio.

https://u.osu.edu/ohioodonatasurvey/2017/11/08/save-the-date-for-odo-con-18-june-22-24-2018/

To identify dragons and damsels in the field, we recommend that you download the ODNR guide (booklet pub 320).

If you enjoy fishing, you may catch a dragonfly in its larval stage and the Atlas of the dragonfly Larvae may help you identify it.

As always, feel free to post any questions right here on our blog.

About the Author:  Angelika Nelson is the curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics and the social media manager for the museum.

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Explaining Science – plant genomics

Brandon Sinn performing molecular lab work

Brandon Sinn performing molecular lab work

Brandon Sinn, PhD graduate from the OSU herbarium, now a postdoctoral fellow at West Virginia University, recently published a paper on molecular work he did to better understand the evolution of genomes in Asarum (Aristolochiaceae), commonly known as wild ginger. The work was done in collaboration with Dylan Sedmak, an OSU undergraduate student, Lawrence Kelly, Associate VP of Science, New York Botanical Garden and John Freudenstein, Professor and Chair of EEOB and Brandon’s PhD advisor.

We interviewed Brandon to get a better understanding of his research findings:

Brandon: “Evolutionary relationships in the flowering plant genus Asarum served as the focus of my dissertation research, and I continue to study the group.  In this particular project we studied six Asarum species, which each represent one of the six major evolutionary lineages within the genus.

Flowers of some Asarum species found in southern Appalachians

Flowers of some Asarum species found in the southern Appalachians

Asarum is a poorly-understood genus of approximately 115 species found in temperate forests across Asia and North America. Some Asarum species are common and widespread across the continents where they are found, while the majority have highly restricted ranges – for example, one species is known only from a single gorge in North Carolina and others are found in only a few counties in the southeastern United States.

During the course of sequencing DNA for my dissertation research, I realized that the genes of some Asarum species were not in the expected order. This departure from expectation was surprising, since the clade, or evolutionary neighborhood, that Asarum belongs to is very old and had been partially characterized as having slowly-evolving and highly conserved genomes. For example, the genome of another member of the same clade has been called a “fossil” genome. It was because of this unexpected observation that we decided to sequence complete genomes from one species from each of Asarum lineage. ”

This lead to the following research questions: Note: A plastome is the genome of a plastid, the organelle responsible for photosynthesis in plants.

1) Have the plastomes of all Asarum species been destabilized and their gene order rearranged?

2) Is the plastome of Saruma henryi (commonly called upright wild ginger), the closest relative of Asarum, of typical arrangement or is it more like that of Asarum?

3) Can we understand how the ordinarily highly conserved and stable plastomes become destabilized by comparing the plastomes of many Asarum species to that of Saruma henryi?

Saruma henryi, a flowering plant in the family Aristolochiaceae, endemic to China

What should we know to understand this research?

Brandon: “Each plant cell contains at least one copy of three distinct genomes. It is easy to imagine that each cell has a copy of the plant’s genome, but many people forget that two types of plant organelles, mitochondria and plastids, also have their own genomes. Plastids, from which chloroplasts develop, have a very small genome that is relatively easy to completely sequence and the sequence of more than 2,000 are publicly available today. The sequencing of thousands of plastomes has resulted in several general trends: 1) plastomes change more slowly than the plant’s own genome; 2) the plastome is made up of three functional regions, the small single copy, large single copy, and inverted repeat regions; 3) the physical order of genes is highly conserved across even distantly related species; 4) there is very strong selective pressure on the preservation of photosynthesis, which most likely constrains the evolution of plastomes in green plants. Our knowledge of the typical layout of the plastid genome, or plastome, has long been relied upon to sequence DNA in order to study plant evolutionary relationships. Traditional DNA sequencing techniques require prior knowledge of the order of genes or regions of a genome. If this order is not as predicted, then the DNA sequencing will fail.”

What method did you use to study your research question?

Brandon: “For this study, we sequenced entire plastomes from six Asarum species and that of Saruma henryi, the closest relative of Asarum. Since traditional DNA sequencing is not useful in destabilized and dynamically rearranged genomes, and we wanted to sequence entire plastomes that we hypothesized were rearranged, we needed to use a technology called massively parallel sequencing. A major advantage of massively parallel sequencing is that a researcher can extract DNA from a tissue, break the DNA into short pieces, and simultaneously sequence all of these fragments without prior knowledge of their physical relationship to one another. The resulting millions of DNA sequences are then assembled, much like a puzzle, using specialized software. The assembled  plastomes can then be compared.”

Brandon explains one of the key figures in his manuscript:

A cruciform DNA structure that has likely destabilized a region of the plastome in Asarum species. Structure courtesy of Eric Knox.

A cruciform DNA structure that has likely destabilized a region of the plastome in Asarum species. The end of the ndhF gene is shown in red. Structure courtesy of Eric Knox.

DNA is made of only four chemicals (which we abbreviate as the letters A, T, C and G) and is not entirely unlike a spiral staircase, where each handrail is a string of these letters. Holding this structure together are bonds that form between certain letters – A-T and G-C. We call these letters nucleotides. Sometimes the nucleotides making up DNA cause the molecule to form complex shapes, such as the cruciform structure shown here. Cruciform, or cross shaped, DNA structures form when the same nucleotides are repeated very close to one another, which is depicted in the vertical “stems”.

plastomes

Cruciform DNA structures can be difficult for the molecular machinery in cells to work with. For example, sometimes molecules that interact with DNA get stuck on the stems, and these structures compromise the integrity of the DNA molecule. When these structures break, which you can imagine by separating the red and black halves of DNA for Saruma henryi, the cell tries to put them back together. But, repairing DNA does not always work perfectly. The results of our research suggest that faulty repairs made to this DNA structure throughout the plastomes of Asarum species have resulted in varying degrees of DNA duplication. Notice that the ndhF gene (shown in red) is typically at one end of the small single copy region, as shown on the Saruma henryi plastome. In Asarum, this gene often has a long stretch of nucleotides that can be “pasted before or after it. In other Asarum plastomes, such as Asarum canadense, we find that all of the small single copy region has been duplicated. The duplication of the formerly single copy region is most likely due to faulty repair of the cruciform DNA structure, where identical strings of nucleotides close to one another led to bonding of two identical DNA regions (as seen in the Asarum canadense cruciform structure).”

Why is this research important?

Brandon: “When you learn about DNA in high school science classes, everything sounds very concrete and well understood, but even gene function in humans is not exhaustively understood. Our basic knowledge about how genes and genomes evolve is in a constant state of improvement. This knowledge is necessary for future breakthroughs in genome engineering, evolutionary and conservation biology, and improving genome stability.  Just as it is important to understand biodiversity at the level of species, it is equally important to understand genomic diversity – the content and structure of genomes, in order to understand how mutations in particular regions of genomes can lead to genome-scale changes over deep time and how these changes affect evolutionary lineages.”

What should you take away from these findings?

1) Just because a species is a member of a very old evolutionary lineage, we should not expect that it is a living fossil and that its genome has changed little.

2) A plastome can function even when gene order is changed and more than half of its genes are present more than once.

3) Small, likely randomly generated repetitive motifs in DNA sequence that is not part of a gene can decrease genome stability, and lead to genome rearrangement and gene duplication.

*******************************************************

Wow, we are now certainly asking questions and getting answers with new techniques that we could not have imagined decades ago. If you want to follow Brandon’s further research, click here.

About the Authors: Brandon Sinn photoBrandon Sinn earned his Ph.D. in 2015 from the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, where he was a member of the Freudenstein Lab in the Museum of Biological Diversity. Brandon has held a postdoctoral research position at the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory of the New York Botanical Garden, where he worked on the Planteome Project. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology of West Virginia University where he studies orchid genome evolution as a member of the Barrett Lab.

Angelika Nelson is the curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics and the social media manager for the museum.

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Reference:
Sinn, B. T., Sedmak, D. D., Kelly, L. M., & Freudenstein, J. V. (2018). Total duplication of the small single copy region in the angiosperm plastome: Rearrangement and inverted repeat instability in Asarum. American journal of botany, 105(1), 71-84.

Explaining Science – Gene flow among song dialects

Today Kandace Glanville, an OSU Forestry Fisheries & Wildlife major and student assistant in the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics, talks with Angelika Nelson, Curator of the Borror Lab, about a recent research publication in the journal Ethology. The study is entitled “High levels of gene flow among song dialect populations of the Puget Sound white-crowned sparrow”.

Find out why we studied the White-crowned Sparrow Zonotrichia leucophrys pugetensis to investigate gene flow among song dialects:

The research aimed to investigate a correlation between behavioral and genetic differentiation:

Song dialects of White-crowned Sparrows along the Pacific northwest coast
Study site in Bandon, Oregon
Angelika Nelson banding a White-crowned Sparrow in the field

Our research built on knowledge from previous studies and used samples that were collected previously:

Angelika working in the molecular lab
Size differences among peaks of microsatellites, nucleotide tandem repeats in DNA sequences
A strand of DNA suspended in buffer

We found gene flow among bird populations that differ in song dialects; this may demonstrate dispersal of young birds across dialect borders:

Our findings are consistent with most studies to date of song and population structure within songbirds. The processes of song learning and dispersal mean that vocalizations are free to vary independently of patterns of divergence in neutral genetic markers.

Reference:
Poesel, Angelika, Anthony C. Fries, Lisa Miller, H. Lisle Gibbs, Jill A. Soha, and Douglas A. Nelson. “High levels of gene flow among song dialect populations of the Puget Sound white‐crowned sparrow.” Ethology 123, no. 9 (2017): 581-592.

 

About the Author: Angelika Nelson is the curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics and the social media manager for the Museum of Biodiversity.

Explaining Science – vermiform mites

You have heard of mites – minute arachnids that have four pairs of legs when adult, are related to the ticks and live in the soil, though some are parasitic on plants or animals. But what are vermiform mites? Maybe you have heard of vermi-compost, a composting technique that uses worms (like your earthworm in the garden) to decompose organic matter. So vermiform mites are mites with a body shape like a worm:

worm-shaped nematalycid Osperalycus

Why are they shaped like a worm, you may ask – To find out more I interviewed Samuel Bolton, former PhD student in the acarology collection at our museum, now Curator of Mites at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods. Sam’s main research interest is in mites that live on plants and in the soil, especially Endeostigmata, a very ancient group of mites that dates back around 400 million years, before there were any trees or forests. Sam’s PhD research with Dr. Hans Klompen here at OSU, was focused on a small family (only five described species) of worm-like mites, called Nematalycidae.

side note: You may have heard of Sam’s research in 2014 when he discovered a new species of mite, not in a far-away country, but across the road from his work place in the museum.

When Sam started his research it was not clear where these worm-like mites in the family Nematalycidae belong in the tree of life. To find out Sam studied several morphological characters of Nematalycidae and other mites. He focused in particular on the mouth-parts of this group. As he learned more about the mouth-parts of this family, he found evidence that they are closely related to another lineage of worm-like mites, the gall mites (Eriophyoidea). Eriophyoidea have a sheath that wraps up a large bundle of stylets. They use these stylets to pierce plant cells, inject saliva into them and suck cell sap.
Although Nematalycidae don’t have stylets, one genus has a very rudimentary type of sheath that extends around part of the pincer-like structures that have been modified into stylets in Eriophyoidea.

So what did Sam and his co-authors discover?

“.. Not only are gall mites the closest related group to Nematalycidae, but the results of our phylogenetic analysis places them within Nematalycidae. This suggests that gall mites are an unusual group of nematalycids that have adapted to feeding and living on plants. Gall mites use their worm-like body in a completely different way from Nematalycidae, which live in deep soil. But both lineages appear to use their worm-like bodies to move around in confined spaces: gall mites can live in the confined spaces in galls, under the epidermis (skin), and in between densely packed trichomes on the surface of leaves;  Nematalycidae live in the tight spaces between the densely packed mineral particles deep in the soil.”

This research potentially increases the size of Sam’s family of expertise, Nematalycidae, from 5 species to 5,000 species. We have yet to confirm this discovery, but it is highly likely that gall mites are closely related to Nematalycidae, even if they are not descended from Nematalycidae. This is interesting because it shows that the worm-like body form evolved less frequently than we thought. This discovery also provides an interesting clue about how gall mites may have originated to become parasites. They may have started out in deep soil as highly elongated mites. When they began feeding on plants, they may have used their worm-shaped bodies to live underneath the epidermis of plants. As they diversified, many of them became shorter and more compact in body shape.

I wish I could tell you now to go out and look for these oddly shaped mites yourself, but you really need a microscope. Eriophyoid mites are minute, averaging 100 to 500 μm in length. For your reference, an average human hair has a diameter of 100 microns.

eriophyoid Aceria anthocoptes

Reference:

Bolton, S. J., Chetverikov, P. E., & Klompen, H. (2017). Morphological support for a clade comprising two vermiform mite lineages: Eriophyoidea (Acariformes) and Nematalycidae (Acariformes). Systematic and Applied Acarology, 22(8), 1096-1131.

 

About the Authors: Angelika Nelson, curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics, interviewed Samuel Bolton, former PhD graduate student in the OSU Acarology lab, now Curator of Mites at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods, in the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ Division of Plant Industry.

 

Summer in the field

This is the time when many students and faculty spend their days in the field doing research or attending conferences and meetings where they present their latest research results. Follow us on social media #ASCinthefield. We will not post here until the beginning of classes on August 22.

Have a great summer!

 

Playing the role of a bee

Mid-spring through mid-summer is a good time to see our native orchids in flower here in Ohio.  One of the showiest groups is the Lady’s Slippers, which have a distinctive pouch-shaped lip.  We have four species of Lady’s Slippers (Cypripedium) in Ohio and one of the more frequent ones is the Yellow Lady’s Slipper (C. parviflorum).  There are two varieties of this species – Large and Small.  The Large (var. pubescens) tends to be a plant of rich woods in more upland situations, while the Small (var. parviflorum) is a plant of wet and often more open situations.  In addition, there are floral differences, including overall flower size and coloration of petals.  In many places they are quite distinct, but in others there seem to be intermediates, which is the main reason that they are not called distinct species.

The Small Yellow Lady’s Slipper in flower at Cedar Bog.

The Small Yellow is the less common one in Ohio, given that there are fewer instances of its habitat than for the Large.  One place that the Small occurs is Cedar Bog in Champaign County.  Cedar Bog is really less of a “bog” and more of a “fen” or swamp, because it is not a lake that has been filled in with Sphagnum moss, creating an acidic habitat, but is rather an alkaline wetland that has water flowing through it.  Cedar Bog is owned by the Ohio History Connection and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

Pollinating a flower.

Unfortunately, the numbers of Small Yellow Lady’s Slippers at Cedar Bog have been declining recently, so the preserve managers wanted to have the flowers hand-pollinated to increase the changes of seed set, rather than depending on bees to do the job.  They called on me as an orchid specialist to perform the pollination, since orchids have a rather specialized floral morphology.  Two weeks ago my colleague, Richard Gardner, from the ODNR Division of Natural Areas and Preserves, picked me up and we headed out to Cedar Bog.  Once there, we put on rubber boots because we needed to hike off the boardwalk to the orchids.  We made our way to the plants, which had been surrounded by plastic fencing to keep the deer from browsing them.  We opened the enclosures and I set to pollinating, removing the pollen masses (pollinia) from one plant with forceps and transferring them to another.  There were only five stems up this year, and only three of those were in flower, so each pollinium was fairly precious.  I did my best, but we won’t know for a few weeks if the pollination was successful – hopefully we will soon see capsules beginning to swell that will be filled with mature seeds by the end of the summer.

You can learn more about Cedar Bog at this website.

About the Author: Dr. John Freudenstein is Director of the OSU Herbarium and Professor of EEOB.  Photographs by Richard Gardner.

Dynamics of Neo-Tropical Arachnids

Today’s post is a guest post by Andrew Mularo,  an undergraduate student in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology. He is currently doing his Tropical Behavior Evolution and Ecology research project under Dr. Rachelle M. M. Adams and Dr. Jonathan Shik.

You may love them or you may fear them, but no one can deny the incredible ecological importance of spiders and scorpions. As an aspiring biologist, I have chosen to study the interactions between arachnids and their environment in the tropical rainforests of Panama for the 2017 Tropical Behavioral Evolution and Ecology course. The tropics are a biodiversity hotspot for the majority of the world’s organisms, so there are plenty of creatures to look at. From the smallest spiderling to the largest tarantula, I am curious to see how these cryptic and intriguing animals interact with their ecosystem.

For my project, I am doing an observational study where I am assessing the relationship between leaf litter and arachnid diversity and abundance. I am accomplishing this by creating several 50 meter transects in the Panamanian rainforest, sampling leaf litter with 1 square meter quadrants along each transect. For each quadrant, I take a measurement of leaf litter depth, and sift through the leaves to extract any organisms out of the area. Back at the lab, I sort through the organisms, first finding any arachnids in the sample, and then any other insect or invertebrate, such as ants, beetles, millipedes, snails, mites and many others. With these data, I hope to make a correlation between leaf litter abundance and arachnid diversity and abundance, as well as a correlation between the diversity of potential prey items and arachnid predators.

Naturally, the majority of the organisms that I have been assessing have been very small, from the size of a thumbnail to not even being visible to the human eye. However, there

Wandering Spider (Photo by A. Mularo)

are several occasions where I have observed some extremely imposing arachnids in the tropical forest. One of these includes the huntsman spider, an extremely large nocturnal species that does not rely on a web to capture its prey. This family of spiders is very poorly researched, and is largely unknown how dangerous the venom is for the majority of species. However, they are quite shy, and often scurry away at the sight or sound of a human.

Another fascinating group of organisms I see occasionally are scorpions. The two pictured below are from the genus Tityus, whose venom is very potent. I found the two in the picture below, which we believe to be different species, huddled in close quarters in the water well of a bromeliad. While potentially dangerous, these are a relatively uncommon sight in the rainforest. Nevertheless, it is always good to be careful where you step.

Tityus scorpions (photo by A. Mularo)

While many of them are feared, arachnids are some of the most fascinating organisms on the planet. They come in all shapes and sizes, and have a wide array of interesting characteristics that are of great interest to scientists. Being interested in biology since I was a child, I have always dreamed of coming to the tropics so I could study the vast diversity of organisms, and I could not have picked a better group of organisms to focus on!

Dragonflies and Damselflies of Ohio

Dragonfly at Magee Marsh Wildlife Area.

Dragonfly at Magee Marsh Wildlife Area.

The Triplehorn Insect Collection is beginning a collaborative project to survey the dragonflies and damselflies of Ohio.

These spectacular aerial predators are surprisingly diverse: currently 164 species have been recorded in the state. Brilliant colors and striking markings make them the songbirds of the insect world. The immature stages of all species are aquatic, and these animals are found in lakes, rivers, ponds, and streams from Lake Erie to the Ohio River.  Although many dragonflies and damselflies are common, a number are listed as threatened or endangered.

This new Ohio Odonata Survey is scheduled to last 3 years. The work will be done together with the ODNR Division of Wildlife, the Ohio Odonata Society, and a network of avid volunteers and citizen scientists across the state.

MaLisa Spring, an Entomologist and recent OSU graduate, just joined us as coordinator for all of these efforts.  She will be working out of the Triplehorn Insect Collection in Columbus, and will be actively interacting with participants around the state.

Information on the project can be found in the newly created Ohio Odonata Survey website.  Project activities will also be widely advertised on social media.

Ohio naturalists are invited to contribute to the project. If you have images that can help document the distribution and seasonality of the various species of dragonflies and damselflies in our state, please check out the guidelines.

Finally, the Ohio Odonata Society will be holding its 2017 annual meeting, ODO-CON-17 on 23-25 June at the Grand River Conservation Campus in Rock Creek, OH.

Damselfly in Columbus, Ohio.
Dragonfly at Magee Marsh Wildlife Area.
Halloween pennant. Specimen from the Triplehorn Insect Collection.
Dragonfly on window screen in Columbus, Ohio.
Close-up of dragonfly on window screen in Columbus, Ohio.

Resources:

Photos by L. Musetti (dragonflies) & Huayan Chen (damselfly).

About the Author: Dr. Norman F. Johnson is an Entomologist, Professor at Ohio State University, and Director of the Triplehorn Insect Collection.

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough .. To Stop Tree Squirrels From Hybridizing

The Chavez Lab will be going to the North Cascades of Washington this summer to do field work in the Tamiasciurus tree squirrel hybrid zone. We have been studying hybrid zone dynamics between Douglas squirrels (T. douglasii) and red squirrels (T. hudsonicus) for 10 years using mostly genetic and phenotypic data. Now is the time to start some observational field research to better document hybrid dysfunction and behavioral interactions between species and their hybrids.

Red squirrel eating seeds from a lodgepole pine cone
Douglas squirrel contemplating its next move

This study contains a richness in questions as to the role that ecological divergence has in the maintenance of isolating barriers and ultimately speciation between these two species. These parapatric species, separated by an extreme change in habitat, meet each other in the different mountain ranges in the Pacific Northwest. Both species live primarily in coniferous forests and have diets and lifestyles that are specialized for feeding on seeds from conifer cones. In the North Cascades region, Douglas squirrels are mostly found on the west side of the Cascade Mountains in a mesic forest environment with a moderate coastal climate. Red squirrels on the other hand are mostly found in the rain-shadow of the Cascade Mountains on the eastside and live in a drier forest with a more seasonally variable climate. Due to the higher fire frequencies in the eastside forest communities, some of the conifer species that red squirrels depend on produce cones with very hard scales or are serotinous (only open during extreme heat from fires). As a result, red squirrels in this region have very strong jaw muscles and bite force in comparison with Douglas squirrels that only feed from trees that produce softer cones. There are many other environmental differences between the westside and eastside environments and thus strong potential for adaptive divergence between these species.

view from Washington Pass at the crest of the Cascade Mountains
Subalpine forest near Washington Pass in the North Cascades

So, you may ask, what does all this ecology have to do with hybridization and speciation? Well, these species may be producing hybrids that have phenotypes that are not well adapted to either type of forest and thus are at a selective disadvantage. Our goal for this study is to examine more directly whether hybrids have lower fitness and dysfunctional traits that decrease their chances of surviving and reproducing. We plan to do this by live-trapping squirrels in a hybrid zone location where I know from previous genetic research that both parental species and hybrids occur. We expect all squirrel types to be living in close proximity with each other and thus we should have good opportunities to study behavioral interactions, as well as document differences in various performance behaviors, such as feeding, mating, vocalization, territorial defense, anti-predator defense, etc…

Stephanie Malinich with bird crownStephanie Malinich is going to be the lead field technician and she will supervise a crew of eager field assistants. Since this is our first field season, we expect a lot of surprises, hopefully more pleasant than difficult ones. This is an exciting time for our lab and we will update you on our findings on this blog later in the year.

 

Andreas ChavezAbout the Author: Andreas Chavez is Assistant Professor in EEOB as of Fall 2016. He is also Director of Mammals in the Tetrapod Collection at the Museum of Biological Diversity. This is his first blog post for the Chavez Lab on the MBD website.

*** Leave a comment to welcome Andreas Chavez ***

Songsters on the move

I have been teaching a class on Ohio Birds since January during which we visit various field sites around Columbus to look for birds. One main goal is for students to be able to identify birds visually and acoustically by the end of the semester. As you may imagine the birds we have been seeing over this time period have  changed quite a bit.

Not only the species have changed but also overall diversity. Venture out in January and you can call it a good day when you see 15-20 bird species. You want to choose your birding location carefully, a variety of habitats (lake, woodlot, open field, and bird feeder) will increase your numbers. These days however 30 species are the norm, it is migration season! While most of our winter guests such as Dark-eyed Junco and American Tree Sparrow have left us and gone north to their breeding grounds in Canada, many other species that spent the winter south, some as far as Argentina, are on their way to our temperate region.

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher. Photo by Christopher Collins, 2017

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher. Photo by Christopher Collins, 2017, via www.fb.com/roguebirders

Have you seen a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher yet? Guess what this bird feeds on! Listen for their begging-like calls high in the tree tops. Their long tail and light-gray appearance are a good give-away.

Spectrogram of calls of Blue-gray Gnatcatcher

Spectrogram of calls of Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, BLB28872

 

Similarly flitting around in the tree tops are kinglets (family Regulidae). These tiny birds (even smaller than chickadees! they weigh only 10g or 2 nickels) seem to be constantly on the move. One of the two species that can be added to your Ohio list, the Golden-crowned Kinglet, even spends the winter with us. Truly an amazing feat in temperatures that can drop to zero Fahrenheit and below on occasions. A good photo of this species shows off their flashy bright yellow crest bordered by a black eyebrow stripe on each side.

Golden-crowned Kinglet. Photo by Chris Collins, via www.fb.com/roguebirders
Ruby-crowned Kinglet. Photo by Jim McCormac, 2017, via http://jimmccormac.blogspot.com/

My favorite though is the Ruby-crowned Kinglet, in particular because of its song. It starts out like its close-relative the Golden-crowned with some very high-pitched tsee notes, but then truly distinguishes itself through a jumble of notes, a musical twitter, that seems incredibly loud given the small size of this songster.

Spectrogram of song of Golden-crowned Kinglet

Spectrogram of song of Golden-crowned Kinglet, BLB17541

Spectrogram of song of Ruby-crowned Kinglet

Spectrogram of song of Ruby-crowned Kinglet, BLB11487

 

But do not underestimate the small! My all-time favorite, the Winter Wren, delivers the loudest song (per unit body weight) of all birds, a beautiful cascade of bubbly notes.

Winter Wren. Photo by Christopher Collins, 2016

Winter Wren. Photo by Christopher Collins, 2016, via www.fb.com/roguebirders

While you may get lucky to hear this song in Ohio on occasion from one of the male Winter Wrens passing through, their song is commonly heard in the deciduous and evergreen forests of the north. By the way, did you know that the male hormone testosterone greatly influences bird song? As these males migrate and get ready for the breeding season, their testosterone levels increase and they start practicing their song – even though they are not setting up territories here or trying to attract females.

Spectrogram of song of Winter Wren

Spectrogram of song of Winter Wren, BLB44620

 

There are many ways to appreciate our songbirds. Since I am fascinated by their song I like to record their vocalizations and take these recordings back to our sound lab and look at them. We humans are just so visually oriented that even the song of a Winter Wren may look more beautiful to us than listening to its sound (This is of course not true if you have a musical ear or train yourself to listen carefully and pick out intricate details).

If you are interested in learning how to record bird songs, look at them at home and compare them to each other join me for a Sound Analysis workshop at the nature center at Battelle Darby Creek metro park on Saturday April 29 from 10:30-11:30 am. If you are an early riser, join us on a Bird Walk at 8 am that same day and listen to the bounty of birds singing at this time of the year.

Credits:
Sound descriptions based on the ones given by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All about Birds.

Thank you Christopher Collins and Jim McCormac for the bird photos.

All recordings are archived in the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics. More detailed information for each can be accessed online; just click on each species’ name:
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher – Golden-crowned Kinglet – Ruby-crowned Kinglet – Winter Wren

About the Author: Angelika Nelson is curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics and instructor of Ohio Birds each spring.

*** Which birds are your favorites? ***