The humble origins of yet another obsession

This is the first in a series of entries about my fascination with a spider found on the Link Trail. If you're not interested in population genetics, give this one a miss.

Up until July I'd never heard of Enoplognatha ovata. Now I'm not only reading research articles on the little suckers, but getting ready to contact some of the folks who wrote those research articles so that I can better understand the population genetics involved. Oh well, anything for a weird life.

Back in July I saw a lot of spiders on the section of trail south of Freber (aka Hodge) Road. At the time I thought that most of them were the same species. After taking a look at the macro shots, I saw the differences in coloration and laughed at my silliness. But after I spent some more time looking at the shots and trying to identify them in BugGuide, I was startled to find that I was right the first time: they were the same species!

Since the female E. ovata shelters her egg sac in a rolled-up leaf, her species only lives near foliage that it can curl up just so. Those kinds of leaves grow on the blackberry bushes along the Link Trail - and in the hedgerows of Nidderdale, a town on the far side of England in Yorkshire. As it turns out, researchers as far off as Nidderdale and as nearby as the Syracuse University research station in Lafayette, New York have been puzzling over E. ovata for decades. And the reason they're so interested is the same reason I thought I was seeing different species.

E. ovata has a striking color polymorphism, which is a pretty way of saying that a spider can have one of several distinct color patterns that are determined by the color genes it got from its parents. Most of the spider's body is a creamy white, yellow, or greenish color. The Lineata morph has no additional color. Redimita individuals have a pair red stripes running down their backs, and in the Ovata morph there's no gap between the stripes: the entire back of the abdomen, i.e. the dorsal opisthosoma (god, I love saying "dorsal opisthosoma") is red. The individual in the lower right corner of the composite image above is Redimita. The other two are Lineata. I didn't see any Ovata, and I'm not likely to: none of the researchers found any in this part of New York State.

Now here's the hook: Although the gene for Ovata is dominant over that for Redimita, and both of the red morphs are dominant over Lineata, percentages of the three morphs in natural populations are the inverse of what one might expect. Most surveys show somewhere around 70% Lineata, 25% Redimita, and 5% Ovata. And these proportions are remarkably stable within almost every local community sampled. This piqued my curiosity. It did the same to a lot of researchers. In the posts to follow I'll be telling you about their findings.

An Early Spring Trip on the Link Trail

A day like late June in CNY, even though it's really late March. All snow is gone from the trail, even in the hedgerow from Ingalls Corners Rd. to the old rail corridor.

Six people from the Bullthistle Hiking Club (from Norwich, NY) and two guests from the CNY Chapter of the North Country Trail Association started hiking about 9:30 am after having spotted cars at Mt. Pleasant Rd. parking area--our destination.

I'm out to just enjoy the trail after having spent the last 10 years building trail, but I can't stop myself from noticing that Steve and Mike's brute work on creating stone steps from the edge of the escarpment down to the old rail bed have held up well over the winter.

We turned north past the abandoned quarry and paused to wonder over the stone structure looming over the taril---what was it for? Lime kiln? Support for a (wooden) water tank for the steam locomotives?

There were a few tiny coltsfoot on the barren March ground and as we approached the Quarry Rd. crossing I noted with pleasure that the buzzards are back. All summer they spiral and float along the edge of the escarpment here, riding the rising air waves. There are usually half a dozen or more; today we see two.

There is a new wind generator right next to the trail. One of our member trail workers has installed it behind his house. Though we can feel no breeze at our level on the trail, the blades and turning fast and quietly.

Soon, the trail swings east and we are in the very bottom of a valley drainage, with wetlands and small streams on each side. The stream are the upper waters of Canastota Creek and we marvel how they (in the 1800's) built a railroad here, in a wetland, in the very apex of the valley's drainage. And the sky looked like a laute June sky...

East of Nelson Rd., at the base of the ledges, we found a few hapatica already in bloom. What marvels! We had lunch at the waterfalls on the outlet to the old Canastota Reservoir. Had to believe this was onece the water supply for the village. It'd almost filled with sediment now and is only a pond. Remnants of concrete conglomerate just belwo the dam, and traces of a wagon road on the other side suggest that a road once crossed on the earthen dam.

We were at Mt. Pleasant Rd and our cars before 2 PM, even with the liesurely lunch and stopping to look at marvels along the way.

Winter's last gasp

For more pictures, see the PicasaWeb album for this hike.

Grace and I had an hour or two before sunset, so we decided on a quick hike south from Perryville. At the Freber/Hodge Road trailhead, the white skein of clouds in an azure sky contrasted brilliantly with the brown desolation on the ground. The snow cover had all but melted, leaving the grit and scum of winter amid the remains of last year's wildflowers. The still-green grass had not yet regained its vitality, and this year's shoots had yet to poke up through the litter. Overall it seemed as though the landscape was spent from its exertions in enduring the winter; the promise of spring was certainly in the air, but first it needed a minute to lie, panting and damp, and catch its breath.

As we walked, we saw here and there a last holdout of snow and ice: to our left a strip of white traced the path of a small stream tumbling down through its rocky channel. To our right, the sun turned the occasional rivulet into a vein of flaming brass. An ice stalagmite still stood within the sluice of water pouring down into the ravine near Carey Hill Road. But the mystery of that day's hike lay beneath our feet.


Every few minutes we found a type of animal dropping we'd never seen before. Its shape was much like dog droppings, but its composition reminded me of owl pellets: it was composed mostly of greyish white hair. The more of these we saw, the more it became clear that it was rabbit hair. Then we began finding some with bones. Clearly a species that frequents the trail had been devouring rabbits more or less whole.

Several times during the next day we came back to the topic of the strange droppings: Birds and snakes swallow their prey whole, but there certainly aren't any around here big enough to swallow even a dismembered rabbit. What animal would be big, hasty, and indiscriminate enough not to bother stripping the desirable meat from the rest of the carcass? We were starting to think that it must have been a pack animal like a coyote, and then I did some Googling and found that we were right.

This site has a good picture that matches what we saw. This one mentions that bobcats, like the rest of the cat family, tend to scratch at the ground in order to cover their scat. Since we didn't notice any signs of scratching, this also points to coyotes. The following excerpt from an article on the Friends of Edgewood Natural Preserve website further supports our conclusion.

Coyotes are opportunistic omnivores. They eat mice, rabbits, other small animals, insects, lizards, frogs, fruits, berries and along urban fringes, domestic livestock and/or garbage. Often the only sign a hiker sees of the local coyote population is the scat they leave along the trail. Coyote scat are difficult to recognize from fox scat. Coyote can be distinguished primarily by their size - those 3/4" or more and greater than 4" are probably coyote. Scat change seasonally -- during the summer and fall they have more berries. During winter and spring you will often find more small animal bones. Scat usually crumble apart in a few days. Finding scat on the trail indicates a coyote has been in the area recently.

Hikers often ask why scat are found on the trail. The rangers propose two theories. First, coyotes use the trails because they are easier to navigate; the same reason hikers remain on the trails instead of trying to go cross-country. Second, trails make excellent natural territorial boundaries. As such, coyotes use scat to mark them.

Another quick hike with Dylan

During my last few visits to Oneida I hadn't had much time to spare, and the weather had been extremely cold, so my outings with my nephew Dylan had been limited to walks along Fairview. This weekend, though, I made a point to get out onto the Link Trail. I packed flashlights, got Dylan thoroughly bundled up in winter boots, plenty of layers, and ample forehead and ear protection, buckled him into the car, and set out for the trail. We parked beside Quarry Road and hiked westward toward the quarry, Dylan's favorite spot on the trail.

There were several inches of snow on the trail, which is rather a lot for a four-year-old, but Dylan made excellent progress. I knew that such a cold, silent, still day didn't afford the opportunities for teaching Dylan about nature that a summer day would, so I decided to focus on that very absence of summer things. I told him how we could see much more of the valley because the deciduous trees had lost their leaves, and pointed out the dark green clumps of coniferous trees across the valley that had not lost their needles. I told him how most, or maybe all, of the spiders we'd seen were dead, but their eggs were down in the leaves beneath the snow, waiting until spring to hatch. I asked him to listen for birds, and told him about migration. I told him how the frogs we saw were now hibernating, and tried to describe that concept. And I showed him some squirrels' nests that, again, we could now see because the leaves had fallen. This awareness of changes as facets of a grander continuity of natural cycles is something I always try to impart to him.

I'd set my countdown timer for about 25 minutes, because I figured that's when we should turn around if we were to make it back to the car before dark. The alarm went off just as we reached the quarry, I lifted up Dylan for a quick peek, and we headed back.

I'm a bit obsessive about finding the perfect walking stick, and I seem to be imparting this obsession to my nephew. Here and there a stick that might be just right for Dylan seemed to call out to me from the trail's edge, and I'd grab it, break it off to the appropriate length, and hand it over for testing. Of course Dylan has no notion yet of how to use a walking stick, so he mostly flails about with it in a way that actually makes him walk slower. But it's the thought that counts, right? And he sure does appreciate the thought. One of these days he'll be outdistancing me, stick or no, so for now I'm going to enjoy this period of contributing to his inchoate hiking skills.

Given the amount of snow on the trail, I was impressed with Dylan's speed. I kept drilling into him the importance of keeping a good pace in order to stay warm, and either it got through to him or he was just enthusiastic about hiking with Uncle Hugh. In any case, we made great time back to the car, and I got Dylan home on time - with his new walking stick!

Three generations enjoying the snow

For more pictures, see the PicasaWeb album for this hike.

Dylan had been raring to get back to his beloved Link Trail, so Grace and I made sure to take him for a hike while we were in town for Thanksgiving. We were lucky enough to have Nathan available to join us. We parked at the Freber/Hodge Road trailhead and walked south onto the trail. Dylan, being four years old, is highly distractable, especially in the snow. Grace did an excellent job of keeping him on task; here is her description of her technique.

It was a mix of 3 things: context (what to expect from the outside world and feelings inside himself), locus of control (I gave him 2 choices, both acceptable, over and over.) and distraction (hero of his own sports story, sense of humor, silliness.)

A) I told him what to expect: how long it was before the end ("see that bend there, it's just beyond there" "we're more than halfway back to the car; can you look for the car?"), that it might feel difficult but that was normal and all the sports stars knew that the very end is harder work, that a little rest would give him alot more energy to run again (kids work in bursts - run, rest, run, rest).

B) I gave him 2 choices:
rest for 1 minute now or keep walking/rest later;
walk or run;
run now and shoulder ride later or walk and no shoulder ride

C) I did sports play by play narration of his running, which was apparently very inspiring and silly.

All this I learned from salon.com/tabletalk.

Thanks to Grace's efforts, Nathan and I had the opportunity to walk and talk amid the quietude of the stark winter day. The bare trees allowed us an open view down into the valley and the ravines. We all did our best to keep Dylan out of the wet spots. With Grace's coaching and coaxing, he did an impressive bit of running toward the end of the hike; he and Grace were one or two hundred yards ahead of me and Nathan by the time we reached the car!

A short hike on a bright autumn day

For more pictures, see the PicasaWeb album for this hike.

It was a pleasant, brightly sunny and cool day - perfect for a hike. Dylan was, as usual, very eager to go. We didn't have much time, so we opted for a quick walk along the section just west of the Cottons Road crossing. This allowed us to revisit the log that Dylan and I found during our hike in September. The tiny creatures burrowing into it had kept busy; sawdust was still raining out of the holes, of which I think none were more than a millimeter in diameter.

As usual, Grace and I were gratified to tell Dylan stories about the natural world. I showed him some hops and told him about how lots of people around here used to work picking them for the brewing of beer. The teasel gave me the opportunity to tell him the story of how people once used them to raise the nap on wool. And he showed me a particularly interesting rock.

It seemed that the season had conspired to create a palette that was bittersweet and intimate: curlicued teasel towered stolidly against the vibrant blue sky; the umber and russet of the maples and the rioting reds, yellows and greens of the sumac stood out against the fields, striped with austere yellow bands of crisped sweet corn and still-green bands of grass and clover; brilliant ruby apples hung from their green island in a spuming grey-brown sea of spent goldenrod.

A Blaze of Glory

I assumed that this work hike would involve trail-clearing so I loaded my trunk with axes and machetes. I left Oneida at 8:30, driving west through Clockville and south on Nelson Road. Other than the guy in the Saturn who passed me and the car ahead on a double line, it was a gorgeous, crisp, sunny morning. The valley was filling with more yellows and reds than I've seen around Oneida in years.

Just before 9:00 I pulled into the designated meeting spot: the parking area at the southwest tip of Cazenovia Lake. Then I found out that Kathy Eisele had sent me an e-mail telling me that all we'd be doing was marking trail. It turned out that Yahoo had put her message in my spam folder, so here I was with a trunk full of blades instead of the one thing I needed: a hammer. Thankfully Kathy had at least one extra.

Once everyone was gathered we formed a caravan and drove to the Dugway Road trailhead. Coordinator Kathy Eisele handed out the new blazes to the group: me, Margaret Maloney, George Zacharek, Kiley Barr, Ron and Linda Wallace, Patrick Dermody, Bill Zimmerman, Jonathan Bienes, Kurt Wheeler and his three young daughters, Chanda Vincent, and Al Larmann. The youngsters went ahead to clear some brush near the far end of the trail while the rest of us who weren't supervising them paired off. Each pair got a stack of yellow plastic rectangles with two holes for nails. Our job was to replace the old blue blazes with these new yellow ones.

Kathy instructed us to skip about a dozen markers ahead of the foremost pair and begin blazing from there. This leapfrog pattern would allow us to efficiently cover the whole trail. My partner Margaret and I started working on our section and I soon learned that there's more to trail marking than I'd expected. The basic rules turned out to be as follows.

• Blaze on the right side of the trail.


• Leave the nails sticking out so the tree has room to grow before it swallows the marker.


• To indicate direction change use two blazes, the one on top offset in the direction of the turn.


• Don't overblaze; if the old marker was unnecessary, don't replace it.


• Don't blaze cherry trees; the wood is valuable.

It seemed to me that many of the previously marked trees were so young that a nail might kill them within a few years. I tried finding larger trees, but in many cases the bark was so spongy and thick that I would have had to bury the nail. Sometimes there were no suitable trees on the right side of the trail, so we had to use a cherry or a tree on the left. All the rules seemed made to be broken.

Margaret and I alternated friendly chatting with scratching our heads over which blazes not to replace (the trail was seriously overblazed) and which rules to break when there was no satisfactory tree to the right of the trail. Per our instructions we turned around when we ran into the group of youngsters and started working on the other side. I didn't count how many blazes we replaced but when I got back to the
trailhead at about 1:10 I was amazed at the enormous stack of blue markers filling my cargo pocket. We'd done more work than I'd realized.