like wise. quiet and the people are great. if you broke down many would stop to help. with our climate its good to help out your neighbors. never know when you’ll be in the same boat.
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Or the same snowy ditch, eh? I agree. It’s worth the sporadic frost, and the truncated springs.
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it always blows me away how quickly things start to grow once that snow goes. imagine in Alaska that transformation is even quicker.
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have you got frost yet? N.B has a frost alert out for tonight so likely one here.
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I am always amazed as well. It is as if life comes bursting so quickly and decidedly, that it is hard to remember what everything looked like a week ago.
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Gotten very close, but no. We’ve hit 34 and 35 a couple times in the last month. I was talking to a customer earlier today who lives about 20 miles south of me. They had a frost about the 25th of August. We just crossed the 2000 Growing Degree unit line a couple days ago as well.
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its been close here several times as well. id be happy to hit early oct. before we got one. my Marquette grapes have their 1st crop on them so i don’t need frost tonight. they are high enough on the the trellis they should be ok.
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I hope and pray you don’t get any before then. I planted Marquette last year, it’s doing very well but no fruit yet. I had some Brianna grapes this year which were delicious, but they ripened at the end of August for me.
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Skinks, all varieties, are typically smooth and shiny, very shiny, often with a beautifully iridescent blue in places. These Italian Wall Lizards are more scaly and not so shiny. You can tell they’re Italian by the way they use their hands when they talk.
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This is a fence swift. Pretty common on the east coast. I’ve definitely seen them in various places in Florida, one of four native species I’ve seen there.
Ha! My best friend Romes ( Chris Romanelli) has that problem to the nth degree! The mouth on that boy too! You can hear him a mile away!
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It seems like they don’t have the cold tolerance to survive outside of the city and only survive there due to the urban heat effect. Despite not being native, nothing is truly native to that highly altered habitat. Even species which had been previously native there are no longer well adapted to it due to how different it is there now. For that reason, the only ecosystem that can develop there is going to be totally different than the ecosystem which had been there before it was a city. Attempts to stand in the way of a new ecosystem from developing by fighting against “invasive species” which can’t survive outside the urban area anyways are just counterproductive.
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It’s not very common to see them in Pennsylvania! I think this is the only one I’ve ever observed. I see red spotted newts often but this little guy was a rare site. Sceloporus undulatus
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That’s interesting, they were extremely common when I lived in Maryland, not all that far away. There’s probably an area along the edge of their range where they expand in mild winters and then die back in harsh ones. It does look like the edge of their range cuts right through PA:
I don’t love the choice of color palette for that map, but the number of subspecies is impressive:
(source)
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This makes me wonder if hardier specimen could survive in my little warmer sliver of Michigan. My area is definitely warmer than the northernmost limits of its habitat.
I saw in a book that there are a couple of native tree frogs (ok, not a lizard but definitely amphibious) here in Mi, though I’ve never seen a single one.
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I live near the edge of that map, and where I found it was on Pittsburgh International Airport property, so likely north of the shown range.
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I lived in Lansing for 11 years and saw them there all the time. A couple years ago I saw one on Russell island. I’ve been there 58 years and that was the first time I saw one. They really blend in with tree bark. They are extremely hard to see. You have to look for them to see one.
We have two lizards in Michigan I never seen one.
I’m a fisherman and have caught mud puppies before. Disgusting looking creatures. I cut the line when I do catch them. I’m not touching that thing.the last time it managed to get off argh!
Until about five years ago for over 60 years I never saw an eagle. Now I see them all the time. I saw one a few years ago and it was flying low. It looked like it had two tails!!
When it went overhead I could see it had a northern pike in its talons. So I did see two tails!
I see them off of Russell island three or four times a year.
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Re: eagles.
I’ve noticed the population around here seems to be really good. I moved closer to the coast and a major river a few years back from a more inland area and it was like a switch was flipped: seeing bald eagles is just a regular part of my life now. But even further from the river where I grew up, when I was in Boy Scouts, we would rarely see bald eagles at the lake. Now, I see them almost every time I visit that lake. Anedata, but it looks like in my region the bald eagles have recovered extremely well.
As for lizards, we’ve got plenty of heat and so plenty of lizards. One interesting development that hasn’t quite reached my state yet is the arrival of tegu lizards. We don’t have any native large lizards in the region, which is definitely an empty ecological niche (presumably we had some species or other before the ice ages). When you’ve got alligators, but your biggest lizard is a skink, something ain’t right. Well, turns out South American tegus fight that niche extremely well, and they’ve managed to colonize a lot of Florida and Georgia. Given their cold tolerance, I suspect it’s a matter of time before they arrive here as well (though the armadillos are going to beat them, by my estimation, the armadillos are only about five years away in their great march north).
I realize most people will see the tegus as invasive. And technically they are. But there’s no way to stop them, because there’s very much a role in our humid subtropical ecosystem for a larger, omnivorous lizard, and it’s likely tegus are going to flourish in that role regardless of their being native or not.
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People often forget that everything we call “native” arrived or evolved at a different time. We’re taught that ecosystems are this stable balanced system that shouldn’t be altered, but in reality ecosystems are constantly changing. I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t protect systems that are precious, but sometimes I think we get too focused on whether or not a species is native rather than whether or not it contributes well to an ecosystem.
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Agreed.
It’s always struck me as peculiar that natural conservation, a field that’s probably as close to “professional hippie” as you can get, is the most ironclad deeply traditional and conservative field of them all. Change, interference, and direct management are bad words, and the ideal is based on whatever the world was like five hundred years ago.
This is a bit of an caricature, I realize, but on a certain level it’s true. To an extent it’s just the leftovers of older ideas about how evolution worked, which was far too idealized (I still hear claims about how local ecosystems are somehow carefully co-evolved and balanced webs rather than just temporary moments of partial stasis amid the general flux of evolution and climate or that a given species has the ideal adaptations to its ecosystem rather than “good enough not to die before having babies”).
But anyway, the point was raised a while back about how the invasive lizards in New York City didn’t belong in that ecosystem. I mean, what ecosystem is that, exactly? Are we talking about the mid-Atlantic forest biome that used to exist there, or are we talking about the emergent ecosystem that exists now in New York City? Because if we’re talking native, those Italian lizards are native to the NYC ecosystem–they’ve been there since the ecosystem first came into existence, and they play a pretty important role in that ecosystem.
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