Best Field Friends Forever: Creature Highlights from the Restoration Crew
By Hannah Hickli, Habitat Restoration Technician
For the restoration field crew, days are spent focusing our energy and physical might on invasive species removal. But at the end of each day, week, or season of pulling Scotch broom, removing ivy, and digging blackberry, it is always the native species we encounter that make the days worth doing. We appreciate every moment in native habitats, but some inhabitants are extra special, and some encounters define the seasons as the days slip by.
Spring is the showiest time in the oak savannahs we dedicate most of our time to, with flowers emerging all around, turning mud and rocks into meadows and seeps. In the last weeks before the Scotch broom begins to set seed, we appreciate the native plants we are clearing space for all the more: bright magenta shooting stars (Dodecatheon sp.), puffs of white saxifrages (Saxifraga paniculata), and velvety heads of chocolate lily (Fritillaria biflora). We see camas (Camassia sp.) and its lesser-known friend, death camas (Toxicoscordion venenosum), often nestled slightly away as generations of human hands moving the inedible plant show themselves in the field. This year, it seemed each death camas flower we came across was decorated with a death camas mining bee (Andrena astragali), a diminutive bee that is the only known bee pollinator of the deadly plant. Hoverflies (Syrphidae sp.) also visit the flower, with a yellow and black striped appearance that is meant to mimic a menacing bee or wasp to protect it from predation. The best mimicry we witnessed this year was not a fly, but a wasp-mimicking moth. Fluttering in the leaf litter, her yellow and black striped body successfully spiked our nerves until we saw the soft black antennae and hairy body of Sesia pacificum, a type of clearwing moth.
Sesia pacificum, the wasp-mimicking moth. Photo by Chelsea Nuez.
As temperatures begin to rise and dew showers the ground, heat-seeking creatures move out from their hiding places. A lucky day at the W̱SÍ,ḴEM Ivy Project reveals an all-black garter snake that looks like it could sit in a pet shop window. This ‘melanistic’ snake has a genetic quirk that has made its scales dark and shining where they should be brown and camouflaged. We hope this little snake made a home for itself. Bugs are also heating up and clumsily move around as they soak in the new spring temperatures. Beetles literally fly into us while we work, and the list of “found because it hit one of us in the chest” sightings includes the second Vancouver Island record of the dark jewel beetle (Dicerca tenebrosa), and the gracefully festooned spotted tree borer (Synaphaeta guexi).
Spotted tree borer (Synaphaeta guexi). Photo by Hannah Hickli.
Dark jewel beetle (Dicerca tenebrosa) Photo by Hannah Hickli.
Sweaty, sunny, and tiring, midsummer is the peak of our restoration season. In the open Douglas fir forests where we slip down bone-dry hillsides carrying bags of Scotch broom, nesting birds make summer exciting. Nighthawks (Chordeiles minor) nest out in the open, and careful steps are taken under arbutus (Arbutus menziesii), where we have previously found a single splotched egg perched unceremoniously in the dirt. A particular stink emanates from the rock cliff below where we are working, revealing a just-abandoned raven nest, a small cave strewn with feathers where young ravens took their first steps. Ground-nesting birds such as dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) and white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) make their presence known, with parents jingling in our ears telling us when to move our broom heap off their rearing grounds. We spy a small stick nest in a bedrock overhang with three perfect tic-tac eggs inside and leave the area. We keep scouting and spy a tiny thimble clover (Trifolium microdon) and small-headed clover (Trifolium microcephalon) pair, with their dainty pink-white cupcakes of flowers, also warning us away from an unideal bag drop area. The even more diminutive few-flowered clover (Trifolium oliganthum) appears. A Trifolium trifecta! All three of these little bundles of beauty don’t appear further north than Vancouver Island. We feel our good luck and move on.
A cloudy late summer day on a small island that sits offshore of Songhees homelands, where blackberry has been prickling our arms. The sun peaks out and begins heating up the salt-washed rocks and awakens intertidal jumping spiders. Perfectly camouflaged hairy pebbles of spiders start appearing from between rock crevices. They make the intertidal their playground, warming my heart as they launch themselves across distances I could barely fit my finger in. Geese that managed to escape the season’s culls stream along the shoreline. Canada geese are a difficult management responsibility on these islands, as the nutrients in their droppings can overload ecological areas and adversely affect sensitive plant communities. Egg addling and hunting are good ways to control populations, but every goose we see appears to have 12 scruffy goslings trailing behind them nonetheless.
On a mountain on Saltspring Island, late summer has brought us up to a wildflower buffet. Butterflies seem especially attracted to these higher elevation areas and as we ascend to the open grassland we find clouds of swallowtails, wood nymphs, skippers, and fritillaries. Deer are an ever-present companion, but late in the season they are renewed to us as the year’s fawns strut with confidence out from their hiding places.
Our work removing invasive species is part of a broader project to repair and conserve relationships to the land, be it plant, animal, or human relationships. The small part that we take up in this work makes us feel wealthy every day, as every good intention and impact we give to the land is fed back to us a hundred-fold; if we are lucky, in the form of an adorable new friend.