American Marten

Scientific name: Martes americana
The American marten (Martes americana), or marten, often incorrectly called the pine marten because of their close resemblance to their European relative, is a member of the mustelid family. The name mustelid came from the fact that members of this family have developed anal scent glands which produce a strong repellent smell that are often used to mark territories. Other members of this family that can be found in New York include fisher, ermine, weasel, mink, and the river otter.

Description:
Marten are a small, slender bodied mammal with a long bushy tail that measure about one-third of their overall length. They have a pointed snout and large round ears in comparison to their head. Generally, the females are smaller than the males. They also have claws that are semi- retractable, just like a cat. The adult female will measure only 18-22 inches in length and weigh 1.5-1.8 pounds while the adult male will be around 20-25 inches in length and 1.6-2.8 pounds. Their fur is made up of long soft hairs. Fur coloring varies greatly between individuals from a pale buff- yellowish color to a reddish brown, with paler head and underparts and darker legs and a light colored throat patch . Marten are often confused with fisher, another member of the weasel family. The fisher can be found through out New York's marten range, is similar appearance and tracks, but the fisher is much large in size than the marten.

Habits:
Marten are solitary mammals, avoiding their own kind except during mating season. Most active during the dusk and dawn hours, they are an arboreal species, spend the majority of their lives in and around mature spruce - fir coniferous forest, or a mixed hardwood, especially beech tree - coniferous forest. This type of environment provides ideal sites for them to den and also great habitat for their primary prey species the red squirrel. Here in New York, the vast majority of marten will be found in the High Peaks region of the Central Adirondacks and surrounding areas. Although they are very shy, marten are extremely curious creatures as well. The sighting reports that we receive from the public are usually encounters with marten staring in a window at them or siting on their seasonal cabin's porch.

Diet:
The American Marten are omnivores. They do prey heavily on small mammals, especially red squirrels, but they are known to eat just about anything- birds, fish, frogs, insects, and carrion. Their diet also includes seasonal fruit, seed, and nuts crops like berries, and especially beech nuts.

Breeding Biology:
Marten have polygynous mating habits, usually breeding with more than one partner. The male establishes his territory and defends it against all other male incursion. Marten breeding season occurs mid summer but the young are not born until late March to early April. This is because marten are part of a group of mammals that have the ability to delay the implantation of fertilized eggs. Even though the female's eggs are fertilized almost right away, the eggs will not become attach to the uterus wall and begin to develop until sometime in February. This is known as delayed implantation. Gestation is actually 42 days. The young or kits as they are correctly called, are born in late March to early April. Both blind and naked at birth, the kits grow rapidly and by about 3 months old they are fully grown. Shortly after that, their mother will leave them to fend for themselves and she will get ready to breed all over again. Marten normally reach sexual maturity around two years of age when they will undergo their first breeding season.

Tracks and Sign:
The marten's foot has very large foot pads in relation to their body weight. This gives them a big advantage of being able to walk on deep snow that is very common in the Central Adirondacks. They grow longer hair between their foot pads in the winter which aids in keeping their feet warm. This hair often distorts the marten's track size. When snow tracking, you may find where a marten will travel "subnevean" or below the surface of the snow, in order to hunt small prey that have taken winter refuge in downed trees It is often difficult to tell the difference between a marten track and their close relative the fisher, especially in poor snow conditions.

Thylacine

Late 96 there was considerable coverage of a sighting in Tasmania by a park official.

In Feb 97 an article in Herald/Sun covered at length the one sighting per month for the past 5 months down near Loch Sport on the ninety-mile beach. The latest was by an RACV mechanic and he saw the animal feeding on a dead wallaby at the side of the road for about 2 minutes from 40 feet away. He said it was striped and a dirty brown grey and about the size of a greyhound.

Just prior to the 4 December 1998 sightings of a large cat in the Grampians there was dramatic footage shown on national TV (10) of an animal claimed to be a thylacine. Experts said they could not rule out the possibility. The footage was shot near Foster north of Wilson's Promontory in Victoria. This is in the same broad area where earlier claimed sightings of thylacines were seen in 1996/97. Another sighting by a National Parks employee in a remote part of Tasmania during about 1997 was also given considerable attention. Thylacines were last found in the wild in the 1930's in Tasmania.

Another interesting account of a thylacine sighting is from Irian Jaya at a remote mountainside where local tribes people report sighting a thylacine. The Melbourne Age carried an article to this effect on 15 April 1997

In early 2000 on Melbourne TV video film shot by an amateur shows what appeared to be a thylacine down in the Gippsland area.

Acipenser fulvescens

Family: Unionidae (Freshwater Mussels)
Synonyms: The elktoe has also been called the Ridged
Wedge-Mussel (Clarke 1981).
Total Range: The elktoe is widespread in North America although patchy in distribution. It occurs in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence drainages south to the Tennessee drainage. It is most abundant in the center of its range (NatureServe).

While in Wisconsin, Illinois, Tennessee, Pennsylvaniaand New York the elktoe is considered apparentlysecure (S4), in other areas of its range it is less secure.The elktoe is considered possibly extirpated (SH) inAlabama and critically imperiled (S1) in Quebec, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma and Vermont. InMinnesota, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia, the elktoe is considered imperiled (S2) and in Ontario, Iowa and Indiana it is vulnerable (S3). In
several states, the elktoe is unranked (S?) (North Dakota, Nebraska, Arkansas, Ohio and Washington..

State Distribution: The elktoe has been found in several areas of Lower Michigan. Historically, it was present in the Grand River in Kent and Ionia Counties (Van der Shalie 1945). Recent surveys indicate that it still occurs in the Grand River, but in reduced numbers (Goforth et al. 2000). Live specimens have also been found in the St. Joseph River in Berrien and Calhoun Counties, St. Joseph (Maumee) River in Hillsdale County, and the Raisin River in Lenawee County (Badra and Goforth 2002, Goforth et al. 2001, Badra and Goforth 2001). During a survey of the Muskegon River watershed in the summer of 2002, live elktoe were found in Osceola County and spent shells were found in Clare and Missaukee Counties. Other recent surveys have found live elktoe in the Pine River in Montcalm County, the Maple River in Gratiot and Clinton Counties, the Looking Glass River in Clinton County and the Red Cedar River in Ingham County. Spent shells have been found recently in the Tittabawassee River in Saginaw County, the Thornapple River in Eaton County, the St. Joseph River in St. Joseph County, and the Black River in Sanilac County, but no live specimens have been recovered in these areas (Badra and Goforth 2002).

Recognition: The elktoe is a relatively small, thinshelled mussel, that may reach up to four inches in length. The shell of the elktoe is elongate, with arounded anterior end and an angled, square posteriorend. It has a prominent posterior ridge, and the posterior slope is ribbed. The umbo is large and centrally located above the hinge line. Beak sculpture is heavy and consists of three to four double-looped ridges. Lateral teeth are generally absent, and one, occasionally two, thin, elongate pseudocardinal teeth are present. The exterior color of the elktoe shell is yellowish green, with prominent broad dark green rays and dots. Thenacre is white and may have some salmon coloring nearthe beak. The foot of the elktoe is bright orange.

In Michigan, the elktoe may be confused most often with the strange floater (Strophitus undulatus). The strange floater lacks the rays and flecks of the elktoe, as well as the heavy beak sculpture. The elktoe may also be confused with the snuffbox (Epioblasma triquetra),slippershell mussel (Alasmidonta viridis) and deertoe (Truncilla truncata). These species lack the ribs found on the posterior dorsal area of the elktoe.

Habitat: The elktoe is found in small to large sized streams and small to medium rivers. It is a riffle species, preferring swifter currents over packed sand and gravel substrates. The elktoe is typically only found in clean, clear water (Cummings and Mayer 1992, Watters 1995, NatureServe).

American Burying Beetle (Nicrophorus americanus)

Status: Federal Endangered

Description: This species is a large (1-1.4 inches, 25-36 mm) carrion beetle with a large orange-red pronotal disk (upper back below head). Other characteristics include orange antennae clubs, red frons and two pairs of red spots on black wing covers (elytra).

Habitat and Habits: The best potential habitat for this species is thought to be woodlands, grasslands and pastureland where sufficient humus and topsoil allow the beetles to bury carrion (dead animals). The American burying beetle is active at night, when the male and female seek large (50-200 g) carrion. The largest pair will move the carrion forward and excavate the soil out from underneath to a depth of about 4 inches. The carrion is cleaned of fur or feathers, shaped into a ball, cleaned of fly larvae and other organisms and covered with a secretion that slows decomposition. Eggs are laid in a tunnel adjacent to the preserved carcass.

When the eggs hatch, the larvae crawl to the carrion ball where one or both parents regurgitate food to the growing larvae. Adults continue to "groom" the carcass as larvae complete development in about two weeks and pupate in the soil. Adults may be present from July through August. This degree of parental care by both parents is rare among insects.

Distribution: This species was historically widely distributed throughout eastern North America in 32 states, the District of Columbia and 3 Canadian provinces. It occurred from Nova Scotia and Quebec in Canada, south to Florida and west to Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas. Presently, only two wild populations are known to exist, one on a New England island and a second at a locaffon in eastern Oklahoma. A specimen recently collected in Nebraska has resulted in continued, extensive surveys to locate additional wild populations. The American burying beetle was collected in Brookings and Union Counties in the 1940s. There have been no recent collections nor sightings in the state.

Conservation Measures: Listed in 1989 as federally endangered, the reasons for this beetle's rarity remain unclear. Captive populations of American burying beetles at Boston University were used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce the species to a second New England island in 1990. Although successful reproduction occurred, overwintering survival and overall reintroduction success were unknown at the time of this publication.

A recovery plan will help in directing efforts to determine causes of the American burying beetle's decline and with subsequent efforts to reestablish the species in suitable locations throughout its former range. A present conservation measure is the secrecy of known population sites to protect against attracting collectors to the areas.

The Burgess Shale

The Burgess Shale is found in an area of the Canadian Rocky Mountains known as the Burgess Pass, and is located in British Columbia's Yoho National Park. Part of the ancient landmass called Laurentia, centered in Hudson Bay, the Burgess Shale represents one of the most diverse and well-preserved fossil localities in the world.

These fossils have been gathered from shales of the Stephen Formation in two quarries opened between Mount Wapta and Mount Field. The upper quarry is known as Walcott's quarry and contains the most famous fossil-collecting site, the Phyllopod Bed.

The lower quarry is known as Raymond's quarry, named after Professor Piercy Raymond of Harvard, a visitor of the site who opened the quarry in 1924. It is now appreciated that the Burgess Shale is a site of exceptional fossil preservation, and records a diversity of animals found nowhere else. In 1981, to protect the site from overgathering, UNESCO designated the Burgess Shale as a world heritage site.

The Burgess Shale contains the best record we have of Cambrian animal fossils. The locality reveals the presence of creatures originating from the Cambrian explosion, an evolutionary burst of animal origins dating 545 to 525 million years ago. During this period, life was restricted to the world's oceans. The land was barren, uninhabited, and subject to erosion; these geologic conditions led to mudslides, where sediment periodically rolled into the seas and buried marine organisms. At the Burgess locality, sediment was deposited in a deep-water basin adjacent to an enormous algal reef with a vertical escarpment several hundred meters high.

Bluebreast Darter

The blue breast darter is a small, colorful fish that usually grows to about three inches in length. It can be distinguished from other darters by its blunt, rounded snout, and its gill covers which are not connected across the breast.

The blue breast darter is olive-green in color and there is a broad light band adjacent to the dark edge of the second dorsal (back), anal (bottom rear), and caudal (tail) fins. Breeding males are extremely colorful, with orange-tinted dorsal fins, numerous small crimson spots on the sides and a bright blue breast - hence its name.

The blue breast darter prefers fast-flowing sections of large streams where the substrate consists of sandy gravel and large stones. The darter uses the stones for protection, and is usually found behind, beside, or under them. The blue breast darter is rare in New York, found only in the upper reaches of the Allegheny River and a tributary.