Tag: Nature Scrapbook

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Cottage Life

Nature Scrapbook: Cardinal flower

By David Byron Keener/Shutterstock

The show-stopping cardinal flower counts on a cottage-country bird for pollination after summer sets in. From late July to mid-September, cardinal flowers stand out in deep crimson along the soggy banks of lakes and slow-moving rivers from New Brunswick to Ontario.

For anywhere from two to five weeks, up to several dozen individual hermaphroditic flowers bloom, a few at a time, along a single, unbranched, knee-high spire, starting from the bottom. Bearing first male, then female parts, each flower makes use of strategic timing to successfully reproduce. 

A newly open flower produces yellow pollen for three to 10 days in a slender, male, brushy-tipped tube projecting from it. Afterwards, a thin, female style emerges from the centre of the tube to receive pollen from other flowers for another two to four days.

In Canada, only ruby-throated hummingbirds pollinate cardinal flowers. Their long, needly beaks reach the rich pools of nectar at the bottoms of the deep tubular beauties. They usually imbibe first at the middle of the floral spire where some female parts are showing and then hover upwards towards the male flowers, which hold the most nectar, at the top. 

Brushed with a strip of pollen onto their foreheads, they then cross-pollinate female-stage blossoms in the middle of the next stem they visit. 

Plants that are pollinated may produce up to 30 dry capsules, which split open in autumn to release thousands of dust-like seeds to the wind. However with most hummingbirds cruising south in late summer, many cardinal flowers never get fertilized. 

Around mid-August, the plants also begin sprouting a ground-hugging cluster of leaves from their shallow roots.  If the plant survives through the winter, it sends up a new flowering stem late the following spring.

After germinating from seed, a cardinal flower usually doesn’t raise a flowering stem until its second spring. The plant seldom lives more than a few years.

This article was originally published in the August 2022 issue of Cottage Life.

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Cottage Life

Nature Scrapbook: The common loon

By Agnieszka Bacal/Shutterstock

How well do you know the iconic loon? Our favourite and famous cottage-country icon is anything but common. Loons are incredibly agile underwater, propelled by powerful, widely splayed legs, which are placed far back on their bodies. This makes walking difficult, but enables them to out-swim and catch dozens of perch, minnows, and other small fish a day.

With heavy, solid-boned bodies, the diving specialists need lake-top runways of 30 to several hundred metres—depending on the wind—to achieve lift off. Once airborne, however, they commonly clock120 kilometres an hour in steadily flapping flight, often calling while overhead. Loons have excellent underwater vision, but their striking red eyes are believed to be largely for show, highlighting them for friend or foe from across the lake.

A pair of breeding loons claims an entire small lake, or bay of a larger lake, as their exclusive territory. The vociferous waterfowl’s heart-warming wail is most often a beckoning between mates, though it’s sometimes joined in chorus by neighbours. One in five loons switch mates during spring territorial competition.

Loons lay eggs in late May or early June. Mates take turns, about every two to four hours, tending to the speckled eggs atop a concealed, shallow mound of grass and sedge at the shoreline. The nest is perched just above water that’s deep enough to permit a quick dive to safety.

Loon eggs hatch in early summer. Within hours, downy grey loon chicks splash into the water, paddling close to their parents, often hitching rides on their backs for rest, warmth, and protection, especially during their first week. One elder always tends them, usually in a quiet, protective nursery cove, while the other is out fishing. Chicks start learning to catch their own finny food when about a month old.

This article was originally published in the June/July 2022 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

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Cottage Life

Nature Scrapbook: The northern spring azure butterfly

By johannviloria/Shutterstock

Flitting, dodging, never seeming to land, northern spring azures are ethereal specks of splendour, appearing miraculously on sunny, warm spring days. The pale blue butterflies herald the unfolding of the season’s ephemeral blossoms—to which they’re intrinsically tied—along forest trails and watersides throughout Canada to the tree line.

Beneath sun-warmed leaf litter, azures emerge from plump, brown or yellowish chrysalids for their maiden flights, unlike the smattering of other early spring butterflies, which overwinter as adults. Males patrol almost constantly for mates, especially mid-afternoon to dusk. They seem to disappear when occasionally landing to bask, the grey-brown undersides of their closed wings blending with ground colours. Living for only a few days to a couple of weeks, they sip a little flower nectar, but tank up on minerals from mud puddles or even animal droppings.

Female azures, distinguished by their black-bordered forewings, generally mate within hours of emerging. The following day, they lay light-green eggs, spaced individually on flower buds of wild cherry, blueberry, dogwoods, and other shrubs with white spring blossoms. They perish soon afterwards.

Their tiny, squat caterpillars, which can be green to whitish, pink, or brown, hatch within several days, and munch buds, flowers, and developing fruits for two to three weeks before they pupate. As they grow, they secrete a greenish honeydew solution, favoured by sweet-toothed ants. In exchange for the sugary drink, the ants protect the developing pupas from spiders, wasps, and other assailants.

While most northern spring azures stay cooped up in chrysalids for 10 or 11 months of the year, some in southeastern Canada pupate within only a few weeks and fly in summer. In southern Ontario and the prairies, a nearly identical but apparently separate species, the summer azure, also takes wing around the same time.