Monthly Archives: August 2020

Cruising the Eastern Arctic – Waters East of Baffin Island

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Having sailed all night after our first day in Iqaluit down the 230-kilometre (140-mile) long Frobisher Bay, we were now cruising for a full day and night in the Arctic Ocean on the south east side of Baffin Island. The largest island in Canada and the fifth largest in the world, it ranks in size behind 1) Greenland, 2) New Guinea, 3) Borneo and 4) Madagascar. Its coastline is made up of many bays, inlets and sounds. Both Baffin Island and Frobisher Bay were named for English explorers; Martin Frobisher landed on what is now Baffin Island in 1576, while William Baffin made two expeditions to the waters off Greenland in 1612 and 1615. (And as a gardener I know that the ultra-hardy, Explorer roses bred by Felicitas Sjveda at the University of Ottawa also include ‘William Baffin’ and ‘Martin Frobisher’). The waters were quiet, the air so clear, and it was our chance to walk the decks to see if we could spot animals on the sea ice.

Then we heard the announcement… “Ladies and gentlemen: starboard, 2 o’clock, polar bear.”  Someone pointed excitedly and the binoculars were all trained on a distant patch of sea ice.

The captain angled the ship gently and slowed the engines, barely creeping forward, then stopped.  We gazed raptly, listening to the ship’s naturalists tell us how lucky we are to see this sight just one day into our journey; some expeditions never see a polar bear.

Out came my telephoto lens and I began clicking, watching as the female bear awakens, yawns, sniffs the air, rises, gazes at us, then walks around a little before slipping off the ice and swimming away.  We were jubilant!

Not much later, there was another announcement. Walruses this time! Another rush to the side of the ship with binoculars; again, the captain slowed so we could observe….

…. a pair of walruses resting on sea ice. According to the World Wildlife Fund, walruses (like polar bears) are threatened by climate change, which reduces the amount of sea ice they use for feeding and resting. Their long tusks are employed for keeping holes in the ice open and pulling themselves out of the water; they can dive up to 30 metres (100 feet) to feed on molluscs, but generally feed in shallower waters.

Sea ice is a major consideration for the captain of any expedition, and ours was no exception. Our trip’s original itinerary had been modified from a much more northerly route out of Resolute Bay to its new starting point in Iqaluit because of a large influx of sea ice through the Northwest Passage caused by a cyclone in the western Arctic.

We would learn much about “ice” on this trip. Sea ice is frozen ocean water that rises, owing to the lower density of ice compared to water. Its thickness and coverage varies each year based on both winter and summer temperatures.  About 12% of the earth’s oceans are covered with sea ice, translating to about 7% of the earth surface, most of it occurring in the Arctic and Antarctic.  Sea ice that is attached or fastened to shorelines or the ocean floor is called “fast ice”; if it moves around in currents or wind, as below, it’s called “drift ice”.  Every summer, warm temperatures cause some sea ice to melt, but never completely. Sea ice greatly affects global warming because the sun’s radiation is reflected back to space from white sea ice (this is called a “high albedo”), unlike dark sea water, which absorbs the sun’s rays and warms the ocean, thus causing more sea ice to melt. The albedo effect of melting sea ice and glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic is one of the positive feedback mechanisms between earth and its atmosphere (“positive”, in this case, being a negative as it increases global warming). Unlike melting glaciers, melting sea ice does not cause sea levels to rise.

Sea ice is relatively flat, unlike icebergs. The National Snow & Ice Data Center keeps track of the percentage of sea ice in the Arctic. Sea ice has various classifications, depending on its age: frazil, slush and grease define sea ice as it forms; nilas is ice up to 10 cm (4 inches) thick; young ice is not yet a year old; then there’s first year ice, second year ice and multi-year ice.  As mentioned above, Arctic animals such as the polar bear, walrus, harp seal and caribou depend on sufficient levels of sea ice for hunting.

Icebergs are chunks of glaciers that have calved off and floated away on ocean currents. They are composed of frozen fresh water that might be thousands of years old.  Glacial melt does cause ocean levels to rise.

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During the day onboard an Adventure Canada expedition, there are various lectures and presentations representing natural history or local culture. On this first full day, we were introduced to two Inuit cultural representatives, Bernadette Dean, left, and Aaju Peter, right. Bernadette was demonstrating one way to use the traditional amautik (an integral part of an Inuit mother’s parka) for a newborn.

Aaju showed us how the kulliq, the traditional Inuit seal-oil lamp, is lit using dried moss and seal oil. Both these traditions are thousands of years old.

Later I caught Aaju chatting with my good friend Anne Fisher, who was the travel coordinator for the Royal Ontario Museum on this voyage. Aaju is a lawyer and a recipient of the Order of Canada, especially for her longstanding and public advocacy for the Inuit sealing industry. She even confronted the EU in 2009, where “she cut a striking figure at the European Union parliament in Strasbourg, France, where she had gone to speak as the EU prepared to vote on whether to ban the import of seal hides into Europe. Dressed in a traditional amauti (parka), she angrily denounced the ban. ‘We are one of the world’s last traditional hunting cultures,” she told reporters, “and seals have been essential to our survival for thousands of years. Should 600 people in [Europe] be allowed to define the terms of our existence?’ ” I will write more about Aaju and traditional sealing later in this blog series.

Then the ship put down anchor in Butterfly Bay off the southeast part of Baffin Island…..

….. and it was into our life vests and off in the zodiacs to get a closer look at the topography.

My only regret on the trip was that there was no geologist to pester. After doing some research on this part of Baffin Island conveniently written by one of Adventure Canada’s occasional resource people, Professor Marc St-Onge titled Geological Synthesis of Baffin Island Bulletin 608-Advance Copy-2020, I think I’m safe in saying the big outcrop behind the ship is gneissic rock (specifically Foxe/Meta Incognita/Hall Peninsula gneissic basement) anywhere from 1.96-2.8 billion years old.  This is Precambrian rock, or what geologists define as the Proterozoic Eon, literally “before animal life”, an era that stretched from 2.5 billion years ago (2.5 Ga, i.e. “giga-annum”) to 541 million years ago. (See Marc St-Onge, below). Beyond that in (Precambrian) deep time was the Archean Eon (2.5-4 Ga), to which some of the rocks in this part of Baffin Island have been dated. “Basement rock” refers to the thick foundation of the continent, in this case “orthogneiss”, a metamorphic rock derived from granite and formed in a tectonic mountain-building period. As my geologist friend Andy Fyon says, rocks like these were “caught up in the collision of two continents, where thick slabs of the rock from one continent was stacked on top of the other continent. The heat and stress on the rocks at the bottom of the stack(s) would have been enormous; hence, the cooking, squeezing, and bending of the plasticine rock.”

Subsequent to publishing this blog, I received a lovely email from Professor Marc St-Onge, referring to the rock above and below. He said, “Indeed that is a gneiss, which means a “layered rock”, probably derived from the mingling of two originally plutonic rocks.  Lighter coloured rock of “tonalitic” composition, and darker coloured rock of “dioritic” composition.  The location off eastern Hall Peninsula would suggest that the gneiss is possibly as old as 3.0 billion years and is part of what is known in the geological literature as the ‘Hall Peninsula tonalitic gneiss complex’. Old ‘Archean’ rocks then to core most of the current continents, with the oldest rock in the world being of course the Acasta Gneiss located 300 km NNW of Yellowknife and discovered by the GSC in 1983.”

The nearby pinkish, domed outcrop, below, is an intrusive plutonic rock*, likely from the Cumberland batholith, approximately 1.85 billion years old, its surface grooved and scraped by ice, possibly from the Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered much of eastern North America.

Professor St-Onge also weighed in on the rock below: “Indeed that does look like a good plutonic rock.  From the photo I would venture to suggest that it is granitic in composition, probably ‘monzogranitic’, derived from melting of the lower continental crust and emplaced probably at a depth of 15 km or so in the middle continental crust.  What is also of interest are the large blocks (we would say ‘enclaves’ in geology) of darker rock, best seen right of centre, probably ‘dioritic’ in composition, which represent pieces rifted off or broken off the lower crust as the pluton was rising to its final depth of emplacement as a crystal mush and eventual solidification.  The location (not the photo) tells me that this plutonic rock is ‘Archean’ in age (aka older than 2.5 billion year old) and likely 2.7 billion years old from units dated in that area of SE Baffin Island.”

It was a short excursion in the zodiacs, all named for stars, with Capella being the sixth-brightest star in the night sky. Now it was time to head back to the ship for dinner. Next up: the tiny hamlet of Pangnirtung

Cruising the Eastern Arctic – Iqaluit

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Next week, we were to have flown to Stockholm to board a ship that would take us through the Baltic Sea. I had booked an extra few days in Sweden at the beginning in order to visit the Linnaeus Garden in Uppsala, long a destination on my botanical bucket list. The cruise included Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Talinn (Estonia), Gdansk (Poland), Berlin, Copenhagen and Alborg (Denmark) and three stops in Norway. I added a short flight from Bergen to Edinburgh en route home to visit the Royal Botanical Garden there, another botanical bucket list must-see. Like everyone’s travel plans in pandemic times, our trip was cancelled.

I know a lot of people who disdain cruises, but the few we have taken have been a wonderful way to nimbly visit a series of far-off places that we would not have seen otherwise. One cruise, on a small French ship, was to the Greek islands and the Turkish coast. Another was what I call a ‘tasting tour’ of Southeast Asia from Bali to Bangkok on a relatively small ship. But my favourite and the most unusual was our 2013 cruise through the Eastern Arctic with Adventure Canada and ROM Travel (Royal Ontario Museum), and I thought it would be fun to recall it here on my blog. It began with a charter flight on First Air from Ottawa…..

…… over the tundra and Hudson Bay….

…..  to land at the cheery, yellow terminal in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, one of Canada’s three northern territories, the others being Yukon and Northwest Territories. Originally called Frobisher Bay, the capital’s name was changed in 1987 to its original Inuktitut word Iqaluit, meaning “place of many fish”.

Shortly after we left the airport, I saw my first patch of dwarf fireweed (Chamerion latifolium), below. I was excited!

After a brief stop at the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut…..

….. built in 1999 when the region was officially declared a Territory of Canada with a consensus government (no political party)….

…. we departed for Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park.  The park is named for the daughter of the New York man who helped to finance American explorer Charles Francis Hall’s expedition to the region c. 1860.  There were informal lectures here, but I was most interested in seeing the flora.

Nunavut has a very short summer window for plants to emerge, flower, fruit and set seed, so our visit on July 27th meant it was the perfect time to see a large selection of natives in bloom. Though it didn’t look promising for those used to seeing large perennials, shrubs and trees (of which there are none here), the ground was a tapestry of tiny treasures.

Best of all, Adventure Canada employed a naturalist named Carolyn Mallory…..

…. who had co-authored Common Plants of Nunavut (which I bought on this trip).  Carolyn would get used to me asking her about plants throughout Nunavut and Greenland.  I have used information in her excellent book to describe the plants I saw at Sylvia Grinnell Park.

That white flower Carolyn is pointing out above is northern Labrador tea, a prostrate member of the rhododendron genus, R. tomentosum subsp. decumbens.

The park was full of plants I had never seen ‘down south’. This is the dwarf shrub white heather (Cassiope tetragona).  Its Inuit name isutit means “fuel for the fire”.

This is Arctic harebell (Campanula uniflora).

Yellow mountain saxifrage (Saxifraga aizoides) is one of many saxifrages in the Arctic.

Lapland pincushion (Diapensia lapponica) is a tiny shrub, barely inches above the ground. Its Inuit name is piriqtut nunaralikuluit.

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This was a pretty combination: yellow alpine arnica (Arnica angustifolia) with purple mountain heather (Phyllodoce caerulea).

Mountain avens (Dryas integrifolia) is another dwarf shrub that rarely exceeds 15 cm (6 inches). In winter its leaves die off but gradually accumulate a thatch that helps conserve moisture in summer.

Yellow oxytrope (Oxytropis maydelliana) has a carrot-like taproot that was traditionally fried with whale blubber or seal fat and eaten as a vegetable (airaq) in spring.

Large-flowered wintergreen (Pyrola grandiflora) is a beautiful little perennial with fragrant flowers. Its leaves turn bright red in winter.

We would see tufted saxifrage (Saxifraga tricuspidata) in many locations on our expedition.

I loved the tiny vignettes that these small plants created with their neighbours. This is moss campion (Silene acaulis) wreathed with net-vein willow (Salix reticulata), one of Nunavut’s thirteen native willow species.

Arctic bladder campion (Silene involucrata) has fused sepals that create a striped bladder that you can see at left.

Arctic poppies (Papaver sp.) look very much alike but can belong to a number of different species, mostly distinguished by variations in leaf lobes and hairs on the leaf reverse or capsules.  On the Nunavut Coat of Arms, poppies represent the summer season.

This is flame lousewort (Pedicularis flammea) and though the sunlight was a little too harsh for photography at this point in the Iqaluit afternoon, you can see why the leaves cause the plant to sometimes be mistaken for a fern before flowers appear.

Look at the beautiful blossoms of mountain cranberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea subsp. minor). Soon there will be shiny, red berries that are evidently sweeter once they’ve gone through a first frost. Inuit people call them kimminait.  Inupiaq people from Alaska often mixed them with meats or fish, storing them underground over winter in birchbark baskets.

I would have a very difficult time separating out the prostrate willows, but Carolyn listed Salix arctophila on her plant list from our day at Sylvia Grinnell, so I’m assuming that’s the identity of the plant below.

However, with Carolyn’s finger for scale, there was no mistaking the tiny leaves of Salix herbacaea, which is one of the world’s smallest shrubs.

Soon our visit to the park ended and we were bused to the shore to climb into one of several zodiacs to ferry us out to…..

….. our home for the next 10 days, a retrofitted 1975 Yugoslavian-built polar cruise ship called MV Sea Adventurer (now renamed the Ocean Adventurer). Though not technically an icebreaker, it has an ice-hardened hull and is listed as an A-1 Ice Class ship capable of negotiating smaller pieces of sea ice.   It was time to begin our adventure in the waters of Nunavut and Greenland…….

….. and watch our first sunset over the Arctic Ocean.  Stay tuned for more.

My Motley Pots

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For someone growing plants in meadows and naturalistic planting beds at ground level at our cottage on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, I spend an inordinate length of time each summer watching a few mismatched pots on the upper deck right outside my cottage living room window. 

At first it was just a pair of oversized resin pots planted with conventional annuals. In 2007, that meant ‘Profusion Orange’ zinnias, nasturtiums, ivy geraniums and peach and yellow African daisies (Osteospermum ‘Symphony Series’).

In 2011, I planted both pots with an eclectic mix of succulents, agastache and spiny porcupine tomato (Solanum pyracanthos) that I bought at the Toronto Botanical Garden’s spring plant sale. 

That was the first year I noticed that the ruby-thoated hummingbird seemed to be enjoying nectaring in the agastache flowers.

In 2012, my pots featured the few succulents I was able to winter over in a sunny ground floor window as well as a swath of colourful portulaca.

In 2015, with photography on my mind, I paid more attention to hummingbird favourites, shopping at a favourite nursery (Toronto’s Plant World, sadly now closed) to buy a selection of salvias and agastaches (aka hummingbird mints) I called my “hummingbird groceries”.

One pot featured deep-pink calibrachoa, orange portulaca and ‘Zahara Double Orange’ zinnias with Agastache ‘Kudos Series’.

The hummingbirds loved Agastache ‘Kudos Coral’.

I added a third pot that summer, planting it with Bidens ferulifolia ‘Campfire Fireburst’ (an over-rated plant)….

….. and some special salvias or sages, including Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips’.

 The hummingbird supped a little in an ordinary nasturtium too.

In 2016, I couldn’t find all the plants I wanted so I filled in with assorted fancy  petunias. I also found holy basil or tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum) which is one of the most amazing bee plants. Since I do a lot of native bee photography, I never had to go far to find a huge assortment of bees to photograph…..

…… including the tiny green sweat bee (Augochlora pura).

But that was the year I discovered that hummingbirds love the Wish series of salvias, including Salvia ‘Ember’s Wish’ below.

The next year, 2017 (notice I added two additional very motley pots from the back of the cottage), I had a pleasant surprise.  The striped and ‘Wave’ series petunias I’d grown the previous year self-seeded in the soil over winter and…

….. produced a beautiful mix of healthy hybrids in all kinds of jewel colours.  I liked them much better than the originals, and some had that old-fashioned fragrance.

I also grew heliotrope (Heliotropium arborescens) for its sweet perfume and was pleased to welcome back self-seeded ‘Apricot Sprite’ agastache (A. aurantiacum)……

….. which is always a hummingbird menu choice.

That year I also grew blackeyed susan vine (Thunbergia alata ‘Susie Yellow‘) on a tripod in one of the pots and caught the hummingbird checking it out on occasion.

In 2018, I worked on my close-up photography.  It’s not that easy to get photos of the male ruby-throated (it’s the male that sports the rosy neck feathers or gorget), since males migrate south much earlier than females, usually by the end of July. But here is monsieur on Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blooms’.

It was fun to try Lantana montevidensis that year, and someone approved!

As always, the self-seeded ‘Apricot Sprite’  (Agastache  aurantiacum) was popular not just with hummingbirds, but with the odd bumble bee too.

For 2019, my motley pots featured the usual suspects in the sage department, and I added a little birdbath which was never visited (though pretty)…..

….. and one unusual Betsy Clebsch (California’s sage queen) hybrid called Salvia ‘Big Swing’.  It was visited once in a while, but it wasn’t as popular as….

…..Salvia ‘Amistad’….

….or Salvia ‘Ember’s Wish’.

Which brings me to 2020.  Actually, let’s go back to November 2019. When I knew my Toronto source for plants of Argentine sage (Salvia guaranitica) was going out of business, I decided to dig up my tender ‘Black and Blooms’ plants and bring them down from Lake Muskoka to the city. I left the pots on the deck in early autumn for my husband to keep watered when I travelled to Greece to take a botanical tour with my pal Liberto Dario. Alas, my husband  also travelled to New York on the coldest night of November and my poor sages sat outside in Toronto as the thermometer plunged to -9C. When I came home, they seemed to have died. But I put them in our basement laundry tubs, gave them a watering, and just watched. Sure enough, little leaves emerged eventually and by March they announced themselves ready to greet hummingbirds for another season.

For some reason, perhaps Covid-19!!, I decided that this would be the year I would return to seed-sowing at home. Alas, I had long ago discarded my old basement grow-lights, but I did have a few LED lights for the gooseneck lamps which I sometimes use for small-scale studio photography.  And I also had an empty 3rd floor guest bedroom window-seat. Voilà, I had seedlings in April!

I had long wanted to try sowing Petunia exserta, a rare, threatened endemic from limestone outcrops in the Serras de Sudeste in Brazil. It was first described in 1987; thirty years later, only fourteen plants were found during an expedition. It is reputed to be a good hummingbird plant, so of course I wanted to try it.  A friend in Victoria gifted me seeds and it turned out to be amazingly eager to germinate and grow!

I also thought it would be fun to grow an old French marigold from seed, a tall single form that was supposed to have been grown by Linnaeus himself in his garden in Upssala, Sweden.  So I ordered seed for Tagetes patula ‘Burning Embers’.  You should know that although this species is called “French” marigold, it’s actually native to Mexico and Guatemala. It got its common name because it was brought back to Europe in the 17th century by Portuguese explorers.  The seeds germinated quickly, but they were a little wonky as they twisted vigorously toward the light.

By June, the annuals were planted in Muskoka and the petunias looked stunning. 

I wasn’t sure if any hummingbirds had found them, but I was convinced later when I saw the watercolour that my son’s girlfriend, Italian artist Marta Motti, made for me as a birthday surprise.  That’s the male with his ruby throat, by the way.

Hummingbird on Petunia exserta by Marta Motti

Late June and early July saw an unrelenting heat wave and drought. On July 4th, I put a thermometer on a chair on my sundeck near my pots and it read 104F-40C.  It was a huge challenge to keep the pots watered sufficiently, and I realized these two annuals were meant for rich, moisture-retentive meadows, not crowded pots.  And the petunias grow upwards in the fashion of indeterminate tomatoes, making flowers only on the end of the shoot and dropping the withered flowers by the dozens.  If you want to revive gangly plants, it’s recommended to shear them back in midsummer to the first branching shoots and new growth will form.

Finally, on July 16th the rains came. It poured. My meadows rejoiced and the motley pots were saturated. I did notice that the bright red of the Petunia exserta faded to a pale rose in the heavy rain, but that seemed to be temporary.  Notice that I had added a few rustic willow arbours to host the red morning glory (Ipomoea coccinea) that I seeded in the pots and has yet to flower.

Fast forward a few weeks to mid-August and the pots look wild, overgrown and the most motley they’ve ever been. Fortunately, I’ve never wanted to win a beauty contest with these containers; it’s all about hummingbirds and bees.

This gold-edged red flower is the classic seed catalogue look of Tagetes patula ‘Burning Embers’,but the seeds I sowed produced a sunset mix of colours, some striped or streaked.

Bumble bees arrived in droves to forage for pollen on them.

They look very festive with the ‘Black and Blooms’ sage.

Though they’re usually listed as growing to 18-24 inches (45-60 cm), mine have reached  41 inches  (104 cm) and may well grow taller.  I was curious about the connection to Linnaeus, and asked my Facebook friend, Swedish ecologist Roger Holt, who was at one time a gardener at the Linnaeus garden. He said: “I asked botanist Jesper Kårehed, responsible for the Linnaeus heritage parts and got the answer that both Linnaeus and his precursor, the universal genius Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) who built the first Swedish Botanical Garden (that later become the Linnaeus garden), had Tagetes patula (and erecta) and from paintings you can see that Rudbeck had the high elongated forms.  In the 1920’s seeds from a form, said to have been picked in the garden of Hammarby, Linnaeus’s private home, started to be around in the trade.  The Linnaeus garden was recreated in the 1930’s, and the tagetes have been there all from the start but probably not the same line of seeds.”

It’s a bit like having Linnaeus’s meadow right outside my window.

The petunias have hosted the odd wasp, and a handsome slaty skimmer dragonfly made it his sunny hunting perch for a few days.

But it has been fun to watch the hummingbird make its way around the flowers, taking a sip out of each.

Here’s a little video I made starring Petunia exserta.

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However, the champion this summer, as every year, is Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blooms’.

Let me leave you with a musical nod to my motley pots and their faithful feathered visitors.

A Gypsy Moth Summer on Lake Muskoka

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Back in late June, I noticed the odd dark, spotted caterpillar here and there on our property on Lake Muskoka, 2-1/2 hours north of Toronto. On July 2nd, my son informed me I had a caterpillar on my leg.  Looking down, I saw a European gypsy moth caterpillar (Lymantria dispar) resting on my pink capris.  Knowing how I love photographing insects, my son actually said, “Or… did you put it there?” Uh, no!  Recalling that the bristly caterpillar can produce an allergic dermatitis, I used a paper towel to remove it and toss it outdoors. Perhaps it was a sign, a portent of the next month as I discovered the extent to which the caterpillars had laid future claim to the trees – mostly oaks and white pines – on our 2 acre property.  Though I had heard from friends about massive defoliation of poplars and other hardwood trees in the farming areas northwest of Toronto, I could detect little or no damage where we were.  Yet. But given the large numbers of female moths and egg masses I found in July, it seems that the caterpillars on Lake Muskoka were just preparing for their assault for 2021, a cyclical peak that normally occurs every 8-10 years..

This last stage of the caterpillar’s spring/early summer existence is quite beautiful, if destructive insects can be said to be beautiful. The studio shot below is by Dr. Didier Descouens of France, via Creative Commons.

Lymantria dispar

“France” and “gypsy moth” have another connection: the scenario that saw an invasive forest pest introduced accidentally by a French artist/entomologist/astronomer named Etienne Leopold Trouvelot.

He was not yet 30 when he emigrated from France in 1857 and settled in the house below on Myrtle Street in Medford, Massachusetts. For a decade, he attempted to raise caterpillars for silkworms, especially those of the North American native Polyphemus moth, a giant silk moth with a 6-inch wingspan.  Silkworm experimentation was something of a fad at that time and it was noted that at one time he had a million larvae in a netted woodland behind his house. Sometime in the late 1860s, he travelled to Europe and returned with gypsy moth eggs, evidently hoping to hybridize them with natives to be disease-resistant.  Around 1868-69, some of the eggs or larvae reportedly blew out his window, a fact to which he confessed in professional circles. However, there was no USDA in those days, no means of inspecting animal or plant species imported from other countries.   It took a few decades for their population to build but by 1889 Medford’s trees were being defoliated by a caterpillar that required massive eradication strategies. And, as we know, that hasn’t worked very well as gypsy moths have made their way north and west in North America, decimating forests as they go. As for Trouvelot, he gave up on moth-rearing and in 1872 was invited to join Harvard College’s astronomy department, where he became renowned for his celestial illustrations and published some fifty papers. By the time he returned to France in 1882, his gypsy moths were well into their reign of terror in Medford.   

At Lake Muskoka, we have a lot of oaks.  They grow all around our cottage, a mix of the predominant red oak (Quercus rubra) and scrubby white oak (Quercus alba).  It’s on the oaks that we see blue jays cracking acorns and woodpeckers, flickers, thrashers and nuthatches scaling the trunks looking for insects. Red-eye vireos nest in oaks. In fact, as entomology professor and best-selling author Doug Tallamy says in his book Bringing Nature Home, oaks are the best trees you can grow to sustain wildlife in your garden.

We have oaks up near our septic field….

…. and at the back of our cottage facing the little bay to the north of us.

I started to pay attention to the gypsy moths flying around. I checked the trunks of the oaks and found a few of the late-stage larval caterpillars….

…. and lots of the next stage — the reddish-brown pupae, below, the bigger ones being the female moth, smaller ones the males.

Some caterpillars had even pupated on the leaves of oaks.

I looked at the sign I had made for our cottage displaying the big white oak trunk in the centre of our main room….

…. and lifted it up to find pupae on the wall behind.

I even found a pupa on a window frame.

I began to inspect the trees and found a female gypsy moth newly eclosed from the pupa. Isn’t she lovely? (Or she would be, if she wasn’t the mother of 200-500 destructive leaf-eaters.)

Down near the lake, on the bark of trees we had previously wrapped with wire mesh to protect from the teeth of beavers, I found a female moth hanging onto the wire.

Not long after the female moth emerges from the pupa, she produces a pheromone which attracts male moths, sometimes more than one at a time.

Male moths spend their lives flying around looking for females, while non-flying female moths often walk upon the bark of the tree, first to find a suitable place to attract males; later, after copulation, she might walk about to find a place to lay her fertilized eggs and cover them with hairs.

Once she has fulfilled her role and produced the distinctive, rusty-brown egg mass, the female falls off the tree and dies.  Though many authorities recommend removing or spraying the egg mass in autumn or winter, I realized that it was much easier to try to control the egg masses while the female was still clearly visible. Our hillside is often under many inches of snow by November, and I didn’t relish slipping and sliding over rocks trying to scrape off egg masses.

Where I saw unhatched pupae, I used a stick to squish the bigger female ones.

Broadleaved trees defoliated by gypsy moth caterpillars in spring will refoliate in mid-summer. Provided there is enough rain, the trees should survive. But conifers do not have this ability, so it was particularly depressing to find a few white pine trees hosting egg masses.  However, I have read research that indicates that white pines are very poor hosts for larval development, compared to oaks.  

For the female moths and egg masses, I made up my own horticultural oil, aka “dormant oil”.  There are many recipes on the internet with various ingredients, but I mixed ½ cup of vegetable oil with 2 tablespoons of liquid dish soap. I then used a tablespoon or two of this concentrated mix in 2 cups of water to make my spray.  My oil will not damage plants but is intended to suffocate the eggs. (You can also buy horticultural/dormant oil formulations at garden centres and big box stores; these generally use refined paraffinic oils.)

It was satisfying to spray the female moth and egg mass.  I also used a stick to squish the moth.

I discovered that moths often favoured a particular tree, where I would find ten or more clustered together.’

This moth had made her nesting spot in the centre of a patch of moss high up an oak trunk. It became my challenge to figure out a way to reach these high locations without killing myself on a ladder.

I adapted an 11-foot telescoping pole used to change the pot lights on our high cottage ceiling, tying a sponge to the mechanism and soaking that in the diluted horticural oil.

That allowed me to reach moths and egg masses some 16 feet up a trunk….

…. soaking the moth and her egg mass with the saturated sponge, below.  For the moths further up on trees, I can only keep my fingers crossed that next winter will be severe enough to damage the eggs. In observations in Michigan, it was found that eggs on southern and western aspects were much less likely to survive severe winter temperature swings than those on northern and eastern aspects.

Some of the literature on gypsy moth control recommends removing litter under trees. That might work in suburban or urban yards, but it isn’t realistic or desirable in a forest like ours, below, where a diverse understory supports all kinds of insects, birds and other life.  

In fact, while moving around under my trees looking for moths, I was rewarded with the sight of two interesting parasitic (non-chlorophyll-producing) plants that are sustained by the mycorrhizae on the roots of oaks: Indian pipe or ghost plant (Monotropa uniflora), below….

… and bear corn or American cancer-root (Conopholis americana).

I did a lot of videography while I was preparing this blog, and made an 11-minute video that provides a little more information.

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Though some panicked property owners and civic officials call for aerial spraying of the biological control agent Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki or Btk in late spring when the caterpillars begin their climb into tree canopies, it is non-specific and will kill the larval stage of all lepidopterans (caterpillars of moths and butterflies) active at that time, including many native insects that co-evolved with our native plants and feed our birds.  Some will say it’s not going to harm the summer caterpillars of monarch or swallowtail butterflies, but that is to ignore a vast web of life that exists in our environment without us noticing.

If you’ve made it this far, you’ll be happy to know I have had rewarding experiences with native caterpillars in the past, especially the monarch love affair I wrote about in last summer’s blog “Bella and Bianca: Our Monarch Chrysalis Summer”.  I only hope that the steps I’ve taken this summer will curtail some of the damage we can expect to see next spring. I’ll be thinking about that as I gaze up at our beautiful oaks when their leaves change to russet and scarlet this autumn. And I’ll report back next year.