Grey Petaltails, habitat for young'uns
Jun. 8th, 2020 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI saw a Grey Petaltail eclosing over the weekend down by my swamp. (Seriously, it's my swamp. It's about three or four acres and it's on private property and I own the private property. Trust me when I say it's my swamp.) I took what shitty pictures I could with my phone (my real camera died, new one is en route from Amazon but cool stuff doesn't wait for the new camera to arrive, so... yeah) and posted them to the "odonate larvae and exuvia" facebook group. (Yes, that's a real facebook group. There are facebook groups for everything, including people who want to look at juvenile odes in their not-so-pretty aquatic forms.)
Apparently Grey Petaltails eclosing is not A Thing that people get to see much, even for people who are making something of an effort to see such things. My crappy cellphone picture was a hit with the facebook group. So yay. Here is the picture:
Again, CELL PHONE. Potato quality. I did what I could, in fairly low light with shitty focus control while kneeling in muck and having big fat droplets of dew falling on me while I tried to take a picture of a fairly fragile ode underneath an uncooperative skunk cabbage leaf. I only have so many hands, here.
As I was well aware of the problems with cellphone pictures, I took a bunch of other ones in case some didn't turn out. As you might expect, I have some stellarly blurry and craptacular pictures of this poor Grey Petaltail doing its magical-girl (Not a Girl. Actually a boy.) transformation sequence. Not all of them were blurry. Some of the other ones came out nicely.
Here's what I saw at very first, while I was hiking to The Swamp to go look for odes...
Because of depth-of-field issues, eclosing odes are best photographed from the side unless you are one of those smart people who does image-stacking in photoshop and stuff. I am not one of those smart people. So, I moved to the side.
I also went back later and picked up the exuvia.
But anyway, the facebook group asked about some habitat pictures. You know, for to help other people do a better job of finding of these guys in their necks of the woods or whatever. And I do think that it might help interested observers who might not know quite where or how to be looking. (Hence yesterday's magnum opus on How To See Adult Grey Petaltails, in which I use tons of words and pictures to say Look at sunny tree trunks in swamps... but I say it more eloquently, and that's the point, innit?)
So okay. I live in a valley in the ridge-n-valley part of Pennsylvania, in Fulton County. Elevation is around 1330 feet. Here are some habitat pictures. All of these pictures can be full size if you click on them but then you'll have to back-arrow to return here. I have added a crappily-drawn red arrow to indicate location of emerging ode in each picture where it is appropriate.
The first picture is coming down the slope (it is not very steep) alongside the little feeder creek to the place where it hits the big creek (in a T intersection). This is generally how I get to The Swamp. (I was on my way to The Swamp when I encountered the eclosing grey petaltail.)
Now, here's a picture from across the big creek showing the little feeder creek where it has the mucky junction with the big creek. I have put some information on the picture in ways that I hope do not detract from the picture itself.
The actual swamp, which is NOT where I saw the grey petaltail emerging from larval form but where I DID see like ten adults basking on tree trunks the following day, is uphill from the big creek, on the other side from the little feeder creek. It looks like this:
Almost 100% of the swamp has ground that at the very least squishes underfoot. Some of it is sort-of-walkable if you're careful about stepping on sedge humps. There is A LOT of skunk cabbage. A LOT of very large cinnamon ferns. There are several visible-current draining "creeks", mostly less than a foot wide. But, they don't actually make things more-drained. There is no end to the water. The average depth of the wet... vegetation is about 4", up to 8" in parts. It is very soft and mucky in some spots, up over the tops of my hikers but you're not going to die in quicksand or anything. It is nowhere knee-deep.
There is not a lot of pooled water like you could see a fish in, the whole thing has a tiny bit of a slope to it to prevent that. BUT, it never dries out, either. It's wet year round, even in drought years. The whole area is what I'd call "heavily" vegetated but it's too wet for most trees to do well so there's excellent sunlight and stuff in the clearing. Visibility at ground level (or for a person on foot) is crap and it is challenging to walk through. You could easily lose sight of another person in the ferns and stuff.
The Swamp has a largely forested watershed with zero ag runoff. Aside from the basic 3 or 4 acres of actual swamp, the surrounding environment is hardwood forest of the sort you get in PA if you own ground that has been timbered a couple of times. It is run of the mill forest, nothing super awesome or special.
Other species I regularly see in The Swamp include Great Blue Skimmers and Brown Spiketails. These are both pretty easy to see as adults. So, if you have habitat with those jobbies, maybe you have Grey Petaltails too. They seem to like the same kinds of things, habitat-wise.
Apparently Grey Petaltails eclosing is not A Thing that people get to see much, even for people who are making something of an effort to see such things. My crappy cellphone picture was a hit with the facebook group. So yay. Here is the picture:
Again, CELL PHONE. Potato quality. I did what I could, in fairly low light with shitty focus control while kneeling in muck and having big fat droplets of dew falling on me while I tried to take a picture of a fairly fragile ode underneath an uncooperative skunk cabbage leaf. I only have so many hands, here.
As I was well aware of the problems with cellphone pictures, I took a bunch of other ones in case some didn't turn out. As you might expect, I have some stellarly blurry and craptacular pictures of this poor Grey Petaltail doing its magical-girl (Not a Girl. Actually a boy.) transformation sequence. Not all of them were blurry. Some of the other ones came out nicely.
Here's what I saw at very first, while I was hiking to The Swamp to go look for odes...
Because of depth-of-field issues, eclosing odes are best photographed from the side unless you are one of those smart people who does image-stacking in photoshop and stuff. I am not one of those smart people. So, I moved to the side.
I also went back later and picked up the exuvia.
But anyway, the facebook group asked about some habitat pictures. You know, for to help other people do a better job of finding of these guys in their necks of the woods or whatever. And I do think that it might help interested observers who might not know quite where or how to be looking. (Hence yesterday's magnum opus on How To See Adult Grey Petaltails, in which I use tons of words and pictures to say Look at sunny tree trunks in swamps... but I say it more eloquently, and that's the point, innit?)
So okay. I live in a valley in the ridge-n-valley part of Pennsylvania, in Fulton County. Elevation is around 1330 feet. Here are some habitat pictures. All of these pictures can be full size if you click on them but then you'll have to back-arrow to return here. I have added a crappily-drawn red arrow to indicate location of emerging ode in each picture where it is appropriate.
The first picture is coming down the slope (it is not very steep) alongside the little feeder creek to the place where it hits the big creek (in a T intersection). This is generally how I get to The Swamp. (I was on my way to The Swamp when I encountered the eclosing grey petaltail.)
Now, here's a picture from across the big creek showing the little feeder creek where it has the mucky junction with the big creek. I have put some information on the picture in ways that I hope do not detract from the picture itself.
The actual swamp, which is NOT where I saw the grey petaltail emerging from larval form but where I DID see like ten adults basking on tree trunks the following day, is uphill from the big creek, on the other side from the little feeder creek. It looks like this:
Almost 100% of the swamp has ground that at the very least squishes underfoot. Some of it is sort-of-walkable if you're careful about stepping on sedge humps. There is A LOT of skunk cabbage. A LOT of very large cinnamon ferns. There are several visible-current draining "creeks", mostly less than a foot wide. But, they don't actually make things more-drained. There is no end to the water. The average depth of the wet... vegetation is about 4", up to 8" in parts. It is very soft and mucky in some spots, up over the tops of my hikers but you're not going to die in quicksand or anything. It is nowhere knee-deep.
There is not a lot of pooled water like you could see a fish in, the whole thing has a tiny bit of a slope to it to prevent that. BUT, it never dries out, either. It's wet year round, even in drought years. The whole area is what I'd call "heavily" vegetated but it's too wet for most trees to do well so there's excellent sunlight and stuff in the clearing. Visibility at ground level (or for a person on foot) is crap and it is challenging to walk through. You could easily lose sight of another person in the ferns and stuff.
The Swamp has a largely forested watershed with zero ag runoff. Aside from the basic 3 or 4 acres of actual swamp, the surrounding environment is hardwood forest of the sort you get in PA if you own ground that has been timbered a couple of times. It is run of the mill forest, nothing super awesome or special.
Other species I regularly see in The Swamp include Great Blue Skimmers and Brown Spiketails. These are both pretty easy to see as adults. So, if you have habitat with those jobbies, maybe you have Grey Petaltails too. They seem to like the same kinds of things, habitat-wise.
