Into the Night: Tales of Nocturnal Wildlife Expeditions

Into the Night: Tales of Nocturnal Wildlife Expeditions

Into the Night: Tales of Nocturnal Wildlife Expeditions
Into the Night: Tales of Nocturnal Wildlife Expeditions

Into the Night: Tales of Nocturnal Wildlife Expeditions

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Overview

This entertaining collection of essays from professional scientists and naturalists provides an enlightening look at the lives of field biologists with a passion for the hidden world of nocturnal wildlife. Into the Night explores the harrowing, fascinating, amusing, and largely unheard personal experiences of scientists willing to forsake the safety of daylight to document the natural history of these uniquely adapted animals.

Contributors tell of confronting North American bears, cougars, and rattlesnakes; suffering red ctenid spider bites in the tropical rain forest; swimming through layers of feeding-frenzied hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos; evading the wrath of African bull elephants in South Africa; and delighting in the curious and gentle nature of foxes and unconditional acceptance by a family of owls. They describe “fire in the sky” across a treeless tundra, a sea ablaze with bioluminescent algae, nighttime earthquakes on the Pacific Rim, and hurricanes and erupting volcanoes on a Caribbean island.

Into the Night reveals rare and unexpected insights into nocturnal field research, illuminating experiences, discoveries, and challenges faced by intrepid biologists studying nature’s nightly marvels across the globe. This volume will be of interest to scientists and general readers alike.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781607322702
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Publication date: 09/15/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 232
File size: 23 MB
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About the Author

Rick A. Adams is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Northern Colorado, founder and president of the Colorado Bat Society, and author of Bats of the Rocky Mountain West (UPC).

Read an Excerpt

Into the Night

Tales of Nocturnal Wildlife Expeditions


By Rick A. Adams

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-270-2



CHAPTER 1

Waiting for Long-eared Owls


STEPHEN R. JONES

I spent my first night at Pine Lake, a peaceful oasis in the Nebraska Sandhills, twenty years ago. I pitched my blue dome tent in a hillside grove of ponderosa pines, where I could gaze out across the water to the empty grass-covered dunes that rolled and tumbled toward the eastern horizon.

At first glance the mile-wide lake seemed somewhat forlorn, with its murky, leach-infested water, surrounded by rickety red picnic tables scattered across patches of mowed pasture grass and aromatic outhouses buzzing with oversized flies. The hills west of the lake sprouted plantation rows of midsize pines and red cedars — most likely a Civilian Conservation Corps inspiration from the 1930s. Between the dirt entrance road and the eastern shore, Nebraska Game and Parks had even installed a metal swing set and a little merry-go-round.

But the lake met my first requirement for prairie camping, solitude. Clearly humans had been here, and recently, but on this late-May evening none were around. Within minutes of setting up camp, I noticed the cottony sensation and faint ringing in my ears that signal escape from the perpetual background noise, the subliminal urban drone, of modern life. As the pine shadows reached out toward the water and the cottonwoods along the shore shimmied in the evening breeze, I felt the euphoria that comes from being alone in a semi-wild place.

I sat in the fragrant pine duff watching rafts of ducks and white pelicans glide across the lake and listening to the metallic chattering of marsh wrens in the cattails below me. Flashy yellow warblers and orchard orioles flitted through the willows along the near shore, while a handsome redheaded woodpecker hammered away on the silvery trunk of a dead cottonwood. At intervals, a pair of long-billed curlews wailed out warnings in the grassy uplands behind me. I heard a vague snort, like someone sneezing, and looked around just in time to see a graceful doe hoist her snow-white tail and bound away into the woods.

I brewed a mug of coffee and then alternated sips and nibbles of a piece of dark chocolate as the sun sank behind the pines and melted into the dunes. A family of coyotes off to the south heralded the moment with a rousing chorus of yips, squeals, and howls. A second family chimed in from across the water. As the first stars burned into the indigo sky, two great horned owls landed in a ponderosa above my tent and hooted me to sleep.

It was the owls, I think, that turned the trick. I had been looking for a home base in the Sandhills, a quiet retreat where I could camp out, track breeding bird populations, and immerse myself in prairie life. I study owls, and I had learned long ago that owl omens are worth heeding.

Almost every culture, during some period of its development, has revered owls as bearers of wisdom or feared them as messengers from the other side. Traditional Ojibwa stories describe how the souls of the dead must pass over an "owl bridge" to reach the spirit world. The Northwest Coast Indians say that a hooting owl portends death. The Cheyenne word mistae means both "spirit" and "owl." The scientific name for the burrowing owl, Athene cunicularia, derives from the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, who is often pictured with an owl perched on her shoulder. Lakota warriors carried burrowing owls into battle, believing the owls' strong medicine would repel enemy arrows.

Today, we tend to characterize such beliefs as quaint superstitions. However, anyone who has worked with owls will tell you that their aura of omniscience is well earned. Materializing and vanishing at will, owls appear wise in the way they calmly watch us. As top-rung predators endowed with supersensitive sight and hearing, they quietly take command of their surroundings, seeming self-composed and aloof.

And, for whatever reason, we sometimes become aware of them during times of grief. Many of us have heard stories of owls visiting a friend or relative after the death of a loved one. I've had this experience. I was sleeping in my mother's house in Palo Alto two nights after her death when I heard loud hoots and wails outside my bedroom window. Astonished, I recognized the hoots as those of a northern spotted owl, a threatened species that seemed entirely out of place in a suburban backyard. A female owl and her fledgling must have flown onto the patio sometime during the night and were perched in a wisteria bush ten feet from where I slept. When I recounted this incident to a friend, she said the same thing had happened to her after her mother's death. She had gone walking alone in the Ohio woods, and a barred owl had flown over and perched on a branch right beside her.

Since I first became seriously aware of owls more than thirty years ago, they have come to me time and again, especially when I'm alone. I remember the tiny flammulated owl who hooted beside my tent in Colorado's Indian Peaks Wilderness; the northern saw-whet who caressed my hair with his talons in Boulder Mountain Park; and the great horned owl who joined me one frigid night along Nebraska's North Platte River, perching placidly on a bare cottonwood limb as Comet Hale-Bopp flared across the sky.

Each of these encounters left me more alert, more receptive to nature's gifts, and happier to be alive. In a way owls have provided a portal to a deeper connection with nature. The wisdom they have passed on is difficult to characterize, but it runs deep.

So when I heard those owls hooting above my tent at Pine Lake and found them there again at dawn, silently watching me, I decided to stick around. I kept coming back, and over twenty years of visiting through all the seasons, I grew to know the lake and its environs better than any other place on earth.

In addition to six species of owls, I documented 103 species of breeding birds at the lake. I followed porcupines through the woods, watched a mink fish from a half-submerged log, was lulled to sleep by crickets, and awakened by loons and grebes. For two years a young wild turkey adopted me, accompanying me on evening walks and trilling me awake at dawn. On moonlit nights a curious coyote sat and howled beside my tent.

I heard the great horned owls almost every evening and saw them at dawn silhouetted against the sky. I soon learned that they knew me much better than I knew them. They seemed to have the spooky ability to distinguish me from other humans, showing little fear when I came near but fleeing when someone else walked by. While strolling among the pines, I often felt a prickly sensation on the back of my neck, and I would swivel around to see a great horned owl staring at me from a nearby tree. Looking into its round impassive eyes, I could guess what it was thinking: "You again. What are you up to now?"

I saw short-eared owls coursing over the cattail marsh at the south end of the lake. Little burrowing owls bobbed up and down on the wooden fence posts that separated the wildlife area from a neighboring ranch. Every once in a while, I'd hear the hiss-scream of a barn owl deep in the woods. On warm summer nights, the quavering wails of eastern screech owls haunted the cottonwoods at the north end of the lake, where turkey vultures huddled on shadowed branches and wood ducks clucked softly to their young.

Sometimes the serenity of this wondrous place left me weak-kneed and trembling with emotion. I would stand in the dunes as the orange rays of the setting sun washed over the prairie, infusing the grass, trees, water, and sky with pure shimmering light. As the owls hooted solemnly from their roost in the pines, I felt I could stay forever.

Sadly, intimate familiarity with any wild place comes at a cost. Even in this protected wildlife area set amid 20,000 square miles of mostly native prairie, things were changing. After a few years I began to notice more shotgun shells littering the pine duff, more tire ruts carved into the dunes, more cottonwood logs stacked up for firewood in the picnic area.

One morning I watched a pair of European starlings evict a family of redheaded woodpeckers from its nest hole in a dead cottonwood. The starlings stayed; the woodpeckers became scarce. As the years went by, I observed fewer native short-tailed grouse and more introduced ring-necked pheasants. Interloping rock pigeons began to flutter through the picnic area.

It was the same story with the owls. I saw my last burrowing owls in 1992, just before the rodent colonies where they had nested disappeared. Short-eared owls became harder to find. They nest on the ground, and I feared that feral house cats, raccoons, and other human-adapted predators were preying on their young.

Witnessing this creeping loss of diversity left me feeling queasy and on edge. With each visit to the lake I became more possessive of its native inhabitants — the curlews and coyotes, resourceful badgers and long-tailed weasels, secretive bitterns and rails. Just seeing a rare or threatened native triggered a host of gnawing concerns. Would that same creature be here next year? Would this unique sanctuary remain protected? Or would all this wild beauty vanish before my eyes?

When I first saw the long-eared owls in April 1992, those visceral fears surged to the surface. My friend Roger and I were setting up camp in the pines when he called out to me in mock consternation, "Oh drat, I guess I'm going to have to move. I'll never get any rest with this long-eared owl staring at me."

She was hunkered down in an old crow's nest in the pine just above his tent. I dropped my camping gear and circled around to get a better look, almost forgetting to breathe.

I never expected to find long-eared owls at Pine Lake. These medium-sized owls have disappeared from much of the prairie region. They suffer from human disturbance of streamside thickets, where they nest, and cultivation of wet meadows, where they hunt mice and voles. The proliferation of great horned owls poses an additional threat. Wherever humans gather on the high plains, so do great horned owls. These larger, human-adapted predators compete with the long-ears and eat their young.

Long-eared owls range clear across the United States and southern Canada as well as through Europe, northern Asia, and parts of North Africa. Named for the false "ear" tufts that sprout from the top of their heads, these owls also possess a distinctly squarish, rusty facial disk. This disk helps to channel sound to their large, sensitive ears.

Standing just over a foot tall but with wingspans of three feet or more, these acrobatic predators can dart through woodland thickets or course low over open meadows. They often catch their prey by "stalling out" and dropping straight down. Though quiet and reclusive, long-ears can be fierce when defending a nest. In Life Histories of North American Birds of Prey, naturalist Arthur Cleveland Bent wrote, "I know of no bird that is bolder or more demonstrative in the defense of its young, or one that can threaten the intruder with more grotesque performances or more weird and varied cries."

Roger and I didn't witness any of these aggressive behaviors. The female sat quietly, glaring resolutely at us as we backed away to a more respectful viewing distance. After several minutes of searching with binoculars, we found her mate lurking in another pine a few meters from the nest.

Ominously, the pair had nested within easy hooting distance of the pine thicket where the local great horned owls were brooding their young. I wondered whether the long-ears had any chance of success. When I returned two months later, I discovered an empty nest flanked by two juvenile great horned owls.

For years I obsessed about the fate of those long-eared owls. Had they renested elsewhere, or had they been killed by their larger competitors? I listened for their barks and wails at night, searched for their slender silhouettes in the pines by day. Once in a while I'd hear a single resonant hoot and feel my pulse quicken, only to recognize the vocalist as a young great horned owl. Eventually, I abandoned hope of seeing or hearing them again.

While camping at the lake several years later, I decided to spend an entire June night wandering along the shore and through the woods. I had idled away the hot afternoon sitting in the shade reading a book of Pawnee mythology. The Pawnee trace their origins to the stars, and their creation stories express reverence and awe for that sacred period between dusk and dawn, when spirits haunt the dank air and visions come rattling out of the void.

One story touched me deeply. A hungry young man whose people had been suffering through a famine spent four days and nights sitting above a cave spring, praying and crying out for a vision. On the fourth night, he gazed at the reflection of the full moon on the water and saw the image of an old woman. He looked up and saw her sitting close by, near the entrance to the cave. She took him by the hand and instructed him in the ways of living. She said that if his people waited patiently, something miraculous would occur. The Pawnee waited for several moons, growing ever more hungry. Just as they were losing hope, the mouth of the cave opened wide and thousands of bison streamed out onto the prairie. After that time, the people lived well, and the earth was whole.

The ethereal beauty of the story awakened my longing for connection with that mystical, quiet time after sunset. I wanted to be out with the owls, to feel their presence in the darkness. Maybe I'd discover something magical, like a Cecropia silk moth a rare yellow rail, or quicksilver moonlight on slate-black water.

I set out from camp an hour before sunset, descending through the pines to the dirt road that follows the western shore. The afternoon breeze had abated, and a pleasant coolness had settled over the water. The green hills across the way began to glow in the sunlight reflecting off a purple-black bank of departing thunderclouds, while the lake surface turned a deep electric blue. A family of crows flapped by, all cawing in chorus as they approached their roost in the pines.

Buoyed by the vibrant light, I strolled down toward the immense cattail-bullrush marsh at the south end of the lake. As the lake surface turned to glass, I watched a family of coots splashing about in the shallows and a half dozen black terns diving and skipping over the water.

Around sunset the first nighthawks appeared, making bull-like vrooors as they hurtled toward the ground and the air rushed through their wings. A bittern called from the cattails. His tranquil frog-like oonk-a-lunk, oonk-a-lunk seeped across the water and dissipated in the swirls of fine mist hugging the shore.

By the time I headed back around the west side of the lake, the owls had begun calling. The great horned owls in the pines near camp started up first, and a second pair answered from across the water. The nearby pair hooted in synchrony, first the male, who-whoo, whoo-whooo, then the female, who-wh-wh-whoo, wh-whoo-whooo, then the male again, monotonously, until night settled in.

The hooting serves two practical purposes: to warn away other great horned owls, and to cement the pair bond. But for me it always has a soothing quality, like the sound of a distant train whistle on a calm winter night. I stood there open-mouthed, reveling in their music, just barely resisting the temptation to hoot back.

During a pause in the performance, I strolled up through the woods and listened for the hissing sounds young owls make when begging for food. I found the family in a grove of pines one hundred meters back from shore. Dozens of owl pellets, oblong gray masses of regurgitated bones and fur, lay at the base of several excrement-splattered trunks. Something scrambled from one branch to another. A gut-wrenching wail and three harsh barks pierced the air, sufficient warning to have me muttering apologies while slinking back down the hill.

As I walked up toward the north end of the lake, I heard some ghostly wails in the cottonwoods — first a drawn-out, horse-like whinny, then an accelerating tremolo, like the sound a ping-pong ball makes when dropped on a hollow table. The screech owls were nesting there in an old woodpecker hole. At dusk they looked like ragged pieces of bark as they roosted tight against the trunk; after dark they became elusive shadows, and to see them would require using my flashlight, a sacrilege on this peaceful night.

I stopped in a wet meadow to watch the fireflies twinkle on and off as they floated from one dewy grass stem to another. Their flash "signature," a languid greenish-white streak following a gently curving line, suggested Photuris pennsylvanicus, a common yellow-gray firefly of grasslands from the Rockies to the Atlantic Coast. I scooped a male out of the air and held him in my cupped hand, admiring the delicacy of his yellow-striped wings and the intensity of the glow emanating from his white abdomen. I opened my hand and the firefly floated away in slow motion, like a feather riding the night breeze. I tracked his flashes across the marsh until they mingled with hundreds of others.

Around midnight a thunderstorm rumbled in from the west. I headed up into the woods to take shelter. I sat propped against a ponderosa as the lightning crackled overhead, the wind whooshed through the trees, and fat raindrops fell from the sky. When the shower passed and the damp air grew dead still, I shook the beaded droplets off my parka and strolled back down to the shore.

On the sandy bank beside the dirt road, pale evening primroses had unfurled their white crepe-paper blossoms, hoping to attract a night-flying sphinx moth. This "hummingbird moth" inserts its long proboscis into the flower's trumpet-shaped throat to extract sweet nectar. In doing so, the moth rubs against the flower's stamens, whose dusty yellow pollen sticks to the insect's fuzzy head. The moth flies to another flower and pollinates it, ensuring that a new generation of evening primrose blossoms will unfurl, embrace the darkness, and feed another generation of moths. The flowers stretched out wide, waiting patiently for the moth. I waited with them, settling into the sandy embankment as the crinkly white blossoms floated back and forth in the breeze. The Milky Way blazed silently overhead. A single cricket chirped drowsily in the meadow across the road. Nothing else stirred. I dozed.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Into the Night by Rick A. Adams. Copyright © 2013 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Cover Contents Preface 1. Waiting for Long-eared Owls 2. African Nights among Fruit Bats, Fig Trees, and Elephants 3. Undersea at Night in Darwin’s Galapagos 4. Chasing Nightly Marvels in the Rocky Mountains 5. Nights on the Equator 6. Do Not Go Gentle into That Tropical Night 7. Nights: From South to North, Hot to Cold 8. Volcanoes and Fruit Bats Contributors
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