A change of pace today due to info I learned in a past Bucket: acorn woodpeckers don’t prefer to eat acorns. I’ve been watching woodpeckers embedding acorns in trees for decades and have met some amazing acorn granary trees. Imagine — all that work and acorns aren’t their main diet! Started me wondering how often does a name accurately describe wildlife or plants and does it matter if it does? What do woodchucks do with wood? How about anteaters and bee-eaters? What flowers do you expect for baby blue eyes or butter ‘n eggs?
Let’s begin with an easy one — woodchucks don’t chuck wood. Marmota monax have other common names: whistle-pig (they do make a whistling alarm call but are rodents not pigs) and groundhog (while they spend most of their time on or under ground, they also can climb trees but are still rodents not hogs). Woodchuck comes from wuchak, their Algonquian name.
Acorn woodpeckers are more complicated.
- All members of an Acorn Woodpecker group spend large amounts of time storing acorns. Acorns typically are stored in holes drilled into a single tree, called a granary tree.
- The Acorn Woodpecker will use human-made structures to store acorns, drilling holes in fenceposts, utility poles, buildings, and even automobile radiators. Occasionally the woodpecker will put acorns into places where it cannot get them out. Woodpeckers put 220 kg (485 lb) of acorns into a wooden water tank in Arizona.
My previous home had three long downspouts that drained from the roof to the ground, one was about 20 feet long. All were tightly packed full of black oak acorns and no water could flow through them. The pipes had to be detached and vigorously slammed to dislodge the acorns.
Yet despite their industrious storage of acorns, these birds would rather eat insects.
… Acorn Woodpeckers prefer to catch flying insects when those are available. They hunt for ants, beetles, and other insects by flying out from high perches. They may hunt insects at any time of year, often storing them in cracks or crevices. Besides nuts and insects, Acorn Woodpeckers also eat fruit, sap, oak catkins, and flower nectar, along with occasional grass seeds, lizards, and even eggs of their own species. In the spring they gather in groups to suck sap from small, shallow holes in tree bark, often using the same sets of sap holes for several years.
The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns spinning around us.
We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below.
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Giant anteaters live up to their name. They eat ants, also termites, beetles, larvae, worms and sometimes fruit. They are giants — 6 to 7 feet long and weigh 60 to 90 pounds. The anteater has powerful forelegs with huge intimidating front claws for digging plus a long tongue to slurp up their prey. Their tongues are two FEET LONG and a half-inch wide and covered with sticky saliva that nabs insects. The rapid-fire tongue shoots out 150 times a minute and they can eat 30,000 insects per day.
One of the most startling wildlife encounters of my life was with a giant anteater. I leaped over a huge log lying across the trail in a tropical forest and nearly landed on an anteater on the other side digging into the log for his dinner. Anteaters have killed humans, jaguars, and pumas, so I was glad he was as surprised as I was and didn’t lash out with his claws.
Bee-eaters live in Africa and Asia, with a few in southern Europe, Australia, and New Guinea. They are named appropriately and eat bees but don’t get stung. These birds cleverly get rid of the stinger and venom before eating.
...bee-eaters predominantly eat flying insects, especially bees and wasps, which are caught in the air by flights from an open perch.
The stinger is removed by repeatedly hitting and rubbing the insect on a hard surface. During this process, pressure is applied to the insect, thereby extracting most of the venom.
Common names for plants and animals are a mess. Sometimes the names describe the animal but only when we know the language being used. For example, porcupine is from Middle French porc and Latin espina, thus spiny pig. This gives us an okay visual image but again, the animal is not really a pig and is in the Rodent Family. Armadillo is from the Spanish armado (armored) and the suffix illo (small).
Squirrel is cool — shade tail.
Squirrel goes back to Medieval Latin scurellus, a diminutive of scurius, which goes back to the Greek skia (shade) + oura (tail). Squirrels use their tails to shade their bodies, and you can often see them holding them up like tiny, fluffy parasols.
Other names make sense in English: bobcat, red-tailed hawk, bald eagle. Plant common names sometimes give clues but other times not. For example, meadowfoam grows in moist meadows and, collectively, looks foamy. (I guess . . . if you squint.)
All three plants in the photos below grow near me and bloom in spring. Baby blue eyes certainly is blue but the flower’s center (that should, in my opinion, be considered the eye), is yellow and white. Popcorn flower is similar to a white baby blue eyes but isn’t called “white eyes.” The flower buds are small round white balls before opening, thus popcorn-like. Butter ‘n eggs is yellow but otherwise doesn’t look anything like its name. Plus, more than one plant species has this common name — one is Triphysaria eriantha (also called Johnny tuck, shown in the trio of photos below). The other is Linaria vulgaris (photo at the end), also called common toadflax and it looks nothing like a toad. The leaves of some Linaria, however, are a bit similar to flax, which is genus Linum. Linaria means “resembling linum.” You see, there’s a reason for the “flax” part but I still don’t know where the toad comes in.
Of course not all plants and animals have common names. They need to be routinely encountered to acquire a common name. Even plants now considered rare might have common names because once they weren’t rare. Or botanists gave the plant a common name when it became rare so it was easier to popularize and promote conservation. We need non-scientists involved in conservation and if that yellow-flowered plant above needed saving what do you think would be talked about more? Butter ‘n eggs or Triphysaria eriantha?
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What plant or animal names help you with identification? Which ones confuse you?
[Hope this looks okay when it publishes because I’m still asleep, unable to fix it. The photos have been glitchy in draft.]