Gordon Smith

Natural History of the Berkshires

10/23/09

Field Journal #5

I entered my site at around 8:45 pm on Wednesday, by which time the sky was fully dark. Unfortunately, due to the location of my site relative to buildings and frequently used pathways, a fully dark sky does not mean a fully dark site because of the ambient light cast by the Mission dormitory as well as the lamps lining the pathways on either side of the site. While I still required a flashlight to maneuver around the site and see anything other than large tree shapes when I was in the center of my site, the edges were illuminated to some extent.

I sat for a while at the base of a large white pine, hoping to hear something worthy of recording, but the longer I sat the more I realized that the only sounds that I would record were human sounds, and that the site itself would remain unheard. There were plenty of cars passing on Mission park road, Park Street and Route 2; plenty of doors opening and closing; numerous people talking as they walked past; and in the background the whirring of a large generator coming from Mission.

The recording I made contained only very few noises above the rustle of leaves in the breeze other than the shifting of my feet in the leaves below and the movement of my hand on the recorder. These were people talking, and church bells tolling faintly, and a door closing, which seems to have been swallowed by electrical crackles. There were no birdcalls of any kind to be heard, no chattering of squirrels or the crackle of leaves as they scampered around, and no chirp of insects of any kind. Of course, this could be explained away by the fact that the birds and squirrels are sleeping and that the loud insects are long gone after the first frost, but still I expected at least some natural noise.

I did, however, see a few small insects in my search. First was a caterpillar that was bright translucent green. It was similar to the caterpillar I described in my fourth site observation (Field Blog 3), except it was slightly larger and green in color. It was residing in a pinecone, and judging by the white silky mat it was resting on, it was in the process of creating a cocoon for itself. It was also very inactive: it did not move as I picked up the pinecone nor did it budge when I poked it with my pencil. At this point I left it to its rest as I had seen a small spider by my foot. It was small (about 7 millimeters long in my estimation), brown, with very thin legs. Its back had an almost stripped pattern with lighter circles in the center of darker stripes. What I soon found interesting about it was that it did not move when I shone my headlamp at it. When I covered the light for a few seconds, it would begin to move again, but would stop about a second after the light was uncovered.

A third critter I encountered was a daddy long-legs, but of a kind I had not before seen. It was brown and had six thin brown legs. The front leg on the right was about twice as long as the others, and seemed to be used almost as a feeler to probe ahead of the insect. On either side of its tiny mandibles it also had two much smaller tan appendages that retracted into the insects body most of the time, but came out to poke the page of my journal as it walked. A fascinating thing about the daddy long-legs was that when I tilted my journal, its legs curved around the lips of the book to hold it in place. It almost seemed like the limbs were prehensile, the way they curved and flexed as the creature required.

The site at night seemed almost the same as it is during the day except for the stillness. During a tour of the site, however, I did notice that the white wood asters have changed from a flowering state to a seed dispersing state with puffy seed dispersing clusters in place of petals.