Creature Feature

This Week’s Creature Feature: Little Raptors in the Night

Saw-whet owls passing through on their annual southern migration

Kathy Knotts

Hearing something going bump in the night? Perhaps it’s a northern saw-whet owl passing through Chesapeake Country on its annual flight south for winter. Volunteers with Project Owlnet hope that’s the case this week as they set out mist nets at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater to try to catch the little raptors.

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– by Kathy Knotts – 10/26/17

Prehistoric Detective Work

Calvert Marine Museum scientist helps solve the mystery of the plesiosaur’s teeth

Sandra Olivetti Martin

Saur, from the Greek, tells you it’s some kind of lizard, likely a dinosaur, as that’s this suffix’s common use. There’s little else familiar about this Plesiosaur — except its connection to Calvert Marine Museum. First, the introduction: Plesiosaurs are stout-bodied, long-necked lizards, from the age of dinosaurs that propelled themselves through their oceanic environment using four flippers.

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– by Sandra Olivetti Martin – 10/19/17

This Week’s Creature Feature All Dressed Up for Autumn

Orb-weavers put on early fall displays

Kathy Knotts

The chill in the air has sent nature’s insect and arachnid world scurrying to get in those last meals. Suddenly we start seeing long-legged and acrobatic guests in our gardens and window frames. Many of Bay Weekly’s Facebook followers sent us their favorite photos of garden spiders. Mainly of the orb-weaver variety, these garden and door-stoop visitors are striking in their white, yellow, black and orange stripes and spots.

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– by Kathy Knotts – 10/5/17

Toadstools

One big, happy fungi family

As summer ends, toadstools seem to appear from nowhere.

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– by – 9/14/17

How Now Brown Cow?

What makes milk chocolate?

Audrey Broomfield

The NPR report that “seven percent of adults still think that chocolate milk comes from chocolate cows,” got me thinking. Breed and coloration can factor into milk production, reports Anne Arundel 4H-er Patricia Williams, who notes that Holsteins are the best milking cow. A single Holstein produces some 2,674 gallons of milk each year.

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– by Audrey Broomfield – 9/7/17

Raising Hungry Little Caterpillars

With monarch butterfly numbers on the wane, they need our help

Kathy Knotts

Jane Bishop of Dick and Jane’s Produce Stand in Harwood has been filling empty stomachs for decades. For one set of mouths, however, she goes the extra mile. Bishop gathers milkweed leaves to hand-feed tiny monarch caterpillars, checking the undersides for new caterpillars. The caterpillars she finds, she raises in a tent at the farm stand and tags them before releasing the developed monarchs for migration.

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– by Kathy Knotts – 8/24/17

The Eastern Carpenter Bee

This bee drills into wood and flowers

Audrey Broomfield

Gazing out at your garden, you’re sure to see pollinators great and small, from bumblebees to butterflies and wasps. One of these winged creatures is out in abundance this time of year. It’s a big bee. But which bee? Photos followed by a few hours of research suggested that the large bee with an all-black abdomen absent hair was the Eastern carpenter bee, Xylocopa virginica.

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– by Audrey Broomfield – 8/17/17

Squeezing Out of a Tight Space

For a few days around the full moon, blue crabs are at their most vulnerable

Audrey Broomfield

Our precious resource, the Atlantic blue crab, grows by backing out of its armored shell. This feat is achieved by the crab swelling its body with water until it literally bursts out of the back seam. The crab will then begin wriggling free, leg by leg times eight plus two claws. Full moons like the one coming August 7 are prime shedding times.

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– by Audrey Broomfield – 8/3/17

Killdeer, Up Close and Personal

Holly Lanzaron’s picture tells a whole story of a new family

Sandra Olivetti Martin

Amid the ordinary, Holly Lanzaron chanced upon the extraordinary. In a shopping center parking lot in Deale, on the crushed stone, a mother killdeer sat hatching four speckled eggs. “We didn’t know that she was nesting right away,” said the Southern Middle-Schooler on Deale Elks Club’s sponsored photo safari with Muddy Creek Artists Guild mentor Bea Poulin and Hannah Dove. “At first we thought that the bird was wounded and could not fly.”

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– by Sandra Olivetti Martin – 7/27/17

The “Meanest and Fiercest Goat”

It’s not all peanuts and mints for the Naval Academy’s Bill the Goat

Audrey Broomfield

The Naval Academy’s mascot is a fighting goat. That goat’s name is Bill, after a pet kept by the first president of the Naval Academy Athletic Association. The emblematic mascot is fashioned after the actual animal as embodied over the years by more than 37 goats. The first goat was only a skin, the remainder of a loved ship goat, and worn by naval officers as they danced for the crowd during halftime.

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– by Audrey Broomfield – 7/20/17

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