Whats happening in the Meadow this winter?

Hi. I’m Ranger Mara in the Big Meadow at Shenandoah National Park. At this time of year, after the leaves have fallen from the trees and the fall color has faded, animals like reptiles, and amphibians, and insects have found secure places under things where they can keep themselves from freezing over the winter. It’s a different world. It’s a quieter world, and you might think there’s not a lot happening. There is a reduction in animal activity. Plants of course have slowed down. Everyone’s waiting for the springtime when they can burst forth in bloom again and and awaken. There are some animals that are still active right now, and we’ll talk about those in just a little bit, but right now I’d like to focus on what you can see on a gentle stroll in a meadow, or just a short hike down the trail At this time of year there’s a lot of evidence around you to tell you what’s been going on all winter and we can start by looking down. This leaf can tell a story.

I wonder if you know what might have made the holes in this oak leaf? 01:44 - They’re perfectly round. You might think a caterpillar, perhaps? Now generally, when a caterpillar feeds on a leaf it’s going to make a hole like this one: not very round, it’s going to be chewing in a a random pattern, but these holes are nice and round. And those are made by insect galls–uh–G-A-L-L. There are several types of insects that make galls on plants, but they’re very small. They can be a little tiny wasp, a little tiny fly or midge–very small insect. And what they do is, they will lay an egg on a leaf, on a stem, whatever their favorite plant is and that egg then will cause a chemical reaction in the plant.

The plant will try to reject that invasive egg and it will cover it up 02:46 - with plant material and it forms a gall. It could be round, it could be oblong…there are different shapes that respond to these different chemicals and oak trees are pretty, um, I should say they’re, they’re pretty popular among gall insects and you can see this one certainly uh was a favorite. So many galls, uh, eggs were laid on this leaf. What happens then is that that egg will hatch and a little wiggler– little tiny wiggly, uh, insect–will come out and it will immediately begin to eat that vegetable material that the plant provided that covered it up. This particular gall, I’ve seen them on here earlier in the season, and they’re small and round, about as big as a blueberry, and they’re kind of fuzzy like a peach. And that is the perfect food for that gall insect baby –whichever it may be.

And, 03:46 - can you imagine what your favorite food is just for a second? And think about your being in a room that’s made up of your favorite food–let’s say strawberry ice cream! Okay, you’re in a room full of strawberry ice cream and the only way out of that room is to eat your way out. That’s exactly what happens with these little gall insects. So they’re eating, eating, eating that vegetable vegetable material which, by the way, is helping to keep it protected from the weather–from the cold temperatures–and from being eaten by something like a bird that might not see it on the underside of the leaf–can hide so it’s eating, eating, eating all the strawberry ice cream that it wants and when it’s had its fill and it’s grown and grown, it will become an adult insect with wings and be able to fly away. But how is it going to do that if there’s no doors or no windows in that room, which there aren’t– it’s just a room, no doors, no windows. That little wiggly insect has to know that it has to chew an escape hole before it transforms into an adult with wings.

So that’s what it does: choose a little hole 05:01 - out of the gall, goes back in, metamorphoses, transforms, and flies out as an adult. And there were quite a few of those happening on this leaf. So pick up a leaf, notice those perfectly round holes you might see, and imagine how many gall insects are out there. So this time of year we see a lot of dead leaves and grasses and they look kind of untidy, and, but, that’s just nature getting ready to go to sleep for the winter. And what happens is those dead leaves and dead grass blades are going to fall to the ground where fungus and bacteria will act on them and help to break them down. That’s that decomposition process that starts.

05:50 - And as that happens, these leaves and grasses will eventually be turned into nice humus soil down here. So it’s nice, and nice and rich, and dark and brown. It’s got a lot of organic material in it right there, and that’s how nature renews itself. So this time of year, when the leaves fall off of the trees here in our eastern temperate forest and our hardwoods lose their leaves until spring, it’s an important time for soil to be renewed. It’s a time of renewal. Even though it seems like nothing’s happening out here, our soil is being recharged with new life and all ready to go to help new seedlings in the springtime.

06:45 - Okay, we’ve just come across an interesting gall right here. This is, uh on a locust sapling–a locust tree–and it’s this swollen part right here where the the twig is coming up and then suddenly it bulges out. And that’s where a gall insect of some sort laid its egg and caused the the sapling to put out some vegetable–vegetative material to cover it up. And what you can also see on this one is that there’s the escape hole right there. So. one successful gall here on the locust sapling. This time of year part of the plan for plants is to renew their their lease on life so they can start over again in the spring, and how they do that is by dropping seeds.

Now the milkweed has a fun way of doing that where their seeds will grow in 07:45 - these big fat pods through September and October, and then in October, after it gets really cold, those pods turn brown and they split open–they crack open, and the wind gently tugs out the seeds which are attached to little bits of fluff which the plant uses to help send them on their way with the help of the wind. And let’s see if we’ll see how far this one goes. Whoa, right there. Okay, but still pretty far from the parent plant. And that’s the idea! If all of the seeds just dropped below the parent plant, then the leaves of the plant might shade it out in the springtime. So by letting your seeds go and sail on the wind as far as they can, they may have a chance of starting a new plant farther away. Milkweed is one of the plants that has a plan B for success and so if their seeds don’t work, the plant can still propagate through underground stems.

And that’s kind of a group–they can put up fla–uh, plant stems 08:59 - that way next year. But each of those stems is just going to be a part of the same plant so the genetic makeup is going to be the sam–every one of those stems. Now if something were to happen, the disease would come in and affect that plant in a bad way, the whole plant could die–all of those stems because they’re connected. They’re all connected to the same plant. Cross-pollination allows a plant to be a little stronger and maybe resist some plant diseases. So when a plant is pollinated–that’s what happened here: the flowers bloom, attract the pollinator like a bee or a butterfly, comes and allows that plant to get pollinated with pollen from another different plant.

Now you’ve got two two two different DNAs working together to form a new plant and that can 09:49 - make a stronger plant. So cross-pollination is always the preferred method in nature, but if it doesn’t work, plan B for success is to grow by underground stem. So milkweed has it made. Some other plants that will disperse their seeds in a similar way also grow in the meadow and I found some right around here. One is the goldenrod. These will have beautiful yellow flowers in September, usually in October, and they will also have fluffy, downy seeds much smaller, but they’re also going to be carried away on a on on the wind. There they go. Okay, so you get a chance to spread seeds far from the parent plant. Others…

let’s see who else we’ve 10:37 - got here that I found…a nice grass here. This is one of our grasses; I believe this is called a broomsedge. It’s actually a grass, but not a sedge; but it will also have these fluffy parts attached to their seeds and they can carry off and make more grasses farther away. And lastly, we found a thistle flower here that has gone to seed and it also has downy fluff that their tiny little seeds are attached to and, I don’t know if there’s any in there… we can see. Oh yes, there’s little tiny seeds attached to this downy fluff, and that will carry them off just like the milkweed that we saw earlier.

What’s also neat about this and this milkweed fluff is 11:26 - that it’s used by other living creatures out here. Especially this time of year, mice and meadow voles–those are rodents that are a lot like mice but they have shorter tails and smaller ears–but they’re both rodents and they are all over the place out here; they’re active all winter. They will take this downy fluff and line their nests with it –make a nice, cozy, warm spot to raise their their babies. So these plants are important, not just the seeds but the fluff that’s attached to them is important to some of our animals here in the meadow as well. We’ve come across some nice fruits of the wild rose.

These are called rose hips and these are 12:18 - native flowers. They will be about about that big around and pink and only five petals beautiful, rather low to the ground but, just a lovely plant. And that’s more of a summer bloomer, but when those flowers are pollinated when they go to seed, they make a rose hip, just like your garden roses will make right there. And those are going to be important foods for those animals that are active in the winter: the birds that are still here that haven’t migrated–birds like junkos and titmice, chickadees, things like that that are here all winter, as well as those rodents we talked about–the mice and the voles. They’re going to depend on low growing fruit like that to help to get them through the winter as well.

And you’ll notice that these rose hips right 13:06 - here are growing in a bed of moss, and that tells us that we’re at the central wetland part of the meadow that stays damp a lot of the year. And this time of year, that water table is recharging from the rainfall and eventually the snow that will melt here and that’s important, You can see that by the path behind us here, that it’s pretty pretty wet and damp, and that tells us that some animals are going to be here that might uh depend on that moist environment and those include our frogs and toads. Here in the springtime, in this wetland, there will be what we call vernal pool–uh ponds of water that just appear for the season and then as the summer goes along and we don’t get much rain, that water table goes back down and those pools dry up. But in the meantime, amphibians like spring peepers and wood frogs and American toads will lay their eggs in this part of the meadow on those wet spaces. And those eggs need time to grow into tadpoles. The tadpoles need time to grow into adults that breathe air and can climb out of those pools.

So 14:23 - as long as those pools stay wet, those animals have a chance to grow to adulthood. So these, the central wetland part of the meadow is important for those particular amphibians. So where do they go in the winter time? What are they doing right now? Frogs and toads will burrow under the mud to stay below the frost line so they can stay healthy through the winter and they basically sort of hibernate through the winter as well. And some frogs even have a sort of antifreeze in their system that keeps them from freezing even if the temperature does catch them where it’s below freezing, so they can partially freeze and still survive through the winter, unlike you and me. Another reason to visit a wetland area like this one in the middle of the Big Meadow, is that because it stays kind of wet.

There’s mud and that mud can help us to know who’s been 15:20 - out here visiting this part of the meadow. So we’ll see some tracks like these right here, and we’re seeing a lot of deer tracks out here, and they’re going in all different directions, so it wasn’t just one deer, you know, going somewhere–it was several deer going lots of places. And that leads us to our next spot, and that’s where we’re going to find out a little bit more about how we can tell how deer have been active in an area. In addition to their tracks, they leave some other evidence behind. So let’s take a look at that next. So the tracks that we just saw down in the middle of the meadow where it’s wet, were indicating that there’s a lot of deer activity here, and the white-tailed deer–this is their time.

This is the mating time for the white-tailed deer, so this is when the hormones 16:15 - are raging, and the males are out there looking for the female. So the bucks–the ones with the antlers–the males are out there looking for for does, or females, to mate with. And the the bucks have an interesting way of settling disputes and they’ll do that with their headgear, or their their antlers. Antlers are made out of bone and they start growing in the springtime, uh kind of edged on, egged on by the hormones that are increasing in the the deer at that time of year. So they start to grow in April and by the end of the summer the the bucks’ antlers are developed enough, they they rub off the velvety outer coating on their antlers, and they’re ready to uh test each other to see who’s the the best in the in the area.

And what they’ll do is they’ll put their antlers together. Now sometimes, uh when you’re just a young buck, you’ll have a small set of antlers like this and a buck that’s this small is going to just look at this guy and say, “You know what? Forget it, you know, you you go right ahead I’ll catch you in a year or two and we’ll, we’ll try we’ll try to fight it out.” Now another buck that would be of a similar size would would see this fellow and say, “Okay, let’s go. We’ll see who’s the best here.” Put their antlers together and they will shove each other around. They’re not necessarily trying to stab each other with their antlers, but they’re they’re going to put their heads together and shove and push, and then the strongest deer, or the one with the most stamina after all of that wrestling match, they’ll try to get different holds and twist their neck and everything like that, and they’ll keep trying to get a hold like that.

And whoever wins, the other buck is going to get tired and he’s going to go away. And then the other deer will be able to mate with the does in that area. And then, either before or after the successful jousting tournament that they just had, the bucks will mark their territory. And they’ll do that with their antlers as well, as as well as some other ways, but they will find a tree and they will just tear it up. They’ll just mark it up. Deer have, uh, scent glands in their heads, on their faces, and on their legs, other areas where they can leave behind a scent mark.

And so 18:54 - they’re basically marking the tree to show other deer that “This is my territory” or “I was here!” and leaving a scent behind as well. And this cedar tree has been really shredded up by a buck and all the way around, it marked its territory up here. Deer, um, often will will mark a tree that has an aroma, and cedars have a nice scent when the bark is scratched or or rubbed off. And other trees that you can often find buck rubs, we call them buck rubs, um, are other aromatic trees like black birch trees, and um balsam fir trees, very aromatic so it’s almost like they’re they’re putting on their cologne and they’re they’re going out and saying “Hey, look at me!” So, uh, buck rubs an interesting part of the, uh, the scene for for deer, and an interesting thing that you can see on a gentle walk in the meadow or on a woodland trail here in Shenandoah National Park at this time of year, when everything is quieting down, there’s still some evidence of things that are going on or have gone on throughout the season. So, I hope you’ll come out and explore the park, the meadow.

Even in the times when 20:20 - there might not be a lot of color in the trees, or flowers blooming, there’s still a lot to see and observe. See you next time. This is Ranger Mara at Shenandoah National Park. .