Sent: Fri 2/7/2003 10:16 AM
Subject: RE: book club meeting: Thu, 2/6

Present: Jim, Sue, Maura, Colleen, Peter.  We discussed
"Guide to Nature in Winter", by Donald Stokes, and
welcomed Colleen back from her internship at Springfield,
where she reports lots of birdlife.  Maura reports
shameless mating bahavior in raccoons; this is indeed
their breeding season. We find the short keys in the book
to be very useful; the back has a short bibliography
if you need more details on a praticular subject.  For a
mushroom book, Jim recommends "Mushrooms of Northeast
North America: Midwest to New England" by George Barron.

Show'n'tell: the mantis egg case had a pungent smell, for
repelling birds and mice; for tips on raising these monsters:
http://www.for-wild.org/sketches/mantis/mantis.html

We opened a couple of the bagworm bags; they have an outer
layer of well-camouflaged plant material covering a tough
silken cocoon.  Inside the female bags, the wingless,
legless, eyeless, mouthless female laid eggs in her former
pupal skin, and dropped out of the bag.  She must have been
mostly egg, because when we opened the darkened pupal skins,
they were full of yellow eggs.  Then we opened one of the
spider egg sacs; Peter had found them in a patch of Reed
Canary Grass on the banks of Sunfish Pond at the Arb when
he took a Winter Fauna class.  The silken sac, the size of a
large grape, was full of squirming spiderlings, so tiny
they're almost translucent, with dots of black, simple eyes.
We left the bundle on a shrub as bird food.

Our next meeting will be Thu 4/3, 7pm; the book will be
"A Year in the Maine Woods" by Bernd Heinrich.  A couple
of recent articles about Heinrich are attached (I know
Yahoo Groups won't show the attachments, but you FANGs
have seen these already.)  Both amazon.com and half.com
have cheap used copies of this book for sale.

No decisions on a field trip yet... watch for info later!

Peter
http://www.wideopenwest.com/~peterwchen/book.html

Sent: Fri 2/14/2003 12:15 PM
Subject: Field trip (book club meeting: Thu, 2/6)

Wendy pointed out to me one of Donald Stokes' other nature
guides, "Guide to Observing Insect Lives".  And wouldn't
you believe, it has nice descriptions of all 3 kinds egg
cases I had brought.  Apparently the spider egg sacs I found
belonged to one of the Argiope garden spiders, but my
remaining egg sac seemes to be both pointed at one side and
flattened on the other, so I'm not sure which species it is.
Wonder if I can raise some spiderlings till they're big
enough for identification?  But certainly my bagworms must
be Thyridopteryx ephemeraeformis, the evergreen bagworm;
Stokes says of the adult stage: "The female is always
wingless and in some cases also lacks mouth parts, legs,
antennae, or eyes".  Hey, don't knock 'em; their pheromones
make them irresistable to the males!

Behind Wendy's house is the ephemeral wetland where we had
a brief field trip in 2001; we found lots of mantis egg cases
at that time.  I revisited last weekend, and found a whole
bunch more.  Hope I have better success this year raising the
bagworms; they'll have to feed the mants AND the spiders.
Stokes also has good descriptions of mantis egg cases; I'll
have to keep my eyes on mine to see if the young do hatch
from the "zone of issue", and if any ichneumon wasps hatch
with them!

For a field trip, Wendy suggested a sedge meadow near the
DuPage River Sports Complex; we're not sure exactly where
that is, so we'll meet in the parking lot of DuPage River Park,
which has a small trail by the east branch.  Then we can
move over to the sedge meadow or Knoch Knolls Park to
check out stuff by the west branch.  Time: Friday, 2/21, 9am.
DuPage River Park is on the southeast corner of Washington
St. and Royce Rd in Naperville (Will County); the parking
lot is on Royce Rd about a quarter mile east of Washington.
Bring some bags in case we find some egg sacs!

Sent: Fri 2/21/2003 4:11 PM
Subject: RE: Field trip

It was a beautiful day for a hike at DuPage River Park.
Present were Jim, Sue, Maura, Wendy, Peter.  Sue immediately
spotted some mantis egg cases on some reed canary grass and
a couple of tree branches.  Other finds include an opossum
jawbone, rabbit fur (and perhaps a tail?), and a whole,
intact mole.  We used Stokes' mushroom keys to id a gigantic
Artist's Fungus (Ganoderma applanatum) growing on a huge
willow stump; under its bark was a colony of box elder bugs
huddling.  The area is in the floodplain of the west branch
of the DuPage River, and has an odd collection of trees
such as willows, a bald cypress, black spruce, and perhaps
an osage orange, probably indicating prior cultivation.
The trail winds to a wet meadow where reed canary grass is
ubiquitous, and in patches multiflora rose and teasel are
creeping in.  Eventually we wound up in a woodland back by
the river, dominated by box elder and a few cottonwoods,
with a few beaver-chewed stumps.  Birds seen and heard
included cardinal, chickadee, canada goose, mallard, song
sparrow, juncos, and some woodpecker drumming.

Peter