Japanese beetle grub.

by Roland D. Hallee

Question of the week, it seems, is this: Are we having an epidemic of grubs?

I’ve been asked that question many times in the past week. It seems folks in our area are seeing an increase in grub activity in the lawns.

What are grubs and what makes them appear in your lawn?

Grubs are the larvae of Japanese beetles. These larvae are the white grubs that devour lawns. Their bodies are c-shaped with brown heads, visible legs and are approximately 1/8 to one inch in length. During their larval stage, they live beneath the surface. Fully grown Japanese beetles are about 1/3 to 1/2 inch in length with a metallic-green body and head copper-colored wing covers. White hair covers the sides and tips of their abdomens.

Japanese Beetle

Adult Japanese beetles get nice and cozy underground over winter. When spring comes, their larvae instinctually move closer to the surface of the soil so they can nourish themselves on the roots of turfgrass. Once they grow into adult beetles, they emerge in mid-summer and feed on the leaves of grass. Unfortunately, their activity causes the grass to create an odor that attracts more hungry beetles. This is why it’s so important to contact a lawn care service if you suspect you have grubs. It won’t take long before you have a full infestation. Catching them before the adults lay eggs, or these eggs hatch breaks up the cycle. Female Japanese beetles can lay as many as 60 eggs throughout their breeding season in late July and August. The eggs will hatch, and grubs dig deeper into the soil to wait for spring, where the cycle starts over again.

Grubs are a staple food in the diets of birds, possums, raccoons, and skunks. If you notice more of these species than usual, it could be a sign of grub activity. These animals will dig up the turfgrass to get to the grubs just beneath the surface.

As grubs chew on the roots of the grass, the blades above the surface will start to brown, wilt, and die off, creating undesirable dead or brown patches in your lawn. Keep in mind that grub damage often has multiple symptoms, so don’t assume you’ve got grubs if the only thing you notice is brown grass. Brown spots in a lawn could be a type of lawn disease. If, however, you see dead grass in conjunction with the other signs, it could be time to consider grub treatment.

As grubs munch their way through a lawn, it can create uneven terrain. They may also create spongy grass that feels like you’re walking on a yoga mat. Grub activity can also cause your grass to become so loose; it can be rolled back like a sod roll.

Grub populations are also normally controlled by various kinds of birds living in or near home landscapes where there is a diversity of plants and wildlife to support them. Yards that are not visited regularly by songbirds have more grubs and plants suffer greater damage than yards where various kinds of birds systematically inspect the soil for grubs and attack adult beetles before they can lay more eggs in the soil.

Also, grubs are more prevalent in yards where there has been frequent routine or preventative use of broad-spectrum insecticides. These products kill bad and good insects indiscriminately, so nature’s first line of defense–the beneficial insects–is eliminated along with the pest insects. Because pest populations rebound faster than those of their natural enemies, the beetles can reestablish themselves unmolested and begin to lay more eggs unchecked.

How To Get Rid Of Grubs

Like all insects, it’s impossible to eradicate the population. Having some grubs on your lawn does not mean the end of the world. However, ten or more per square foot is when you’ll start to notice the damage. There are several ways of implementing do-it-yourself pest control.

Keep your lawn well-nourished with nitrogen fertilizer, as well as phosphorous and potassium. These are the three key ingredients to a healthy lawn.

Keep the mower height between two and three inches. This promotes a healthy root system, which is less prone to grub infestation.

Treat dead or dying areas with an overseeding application to restore damaged areas, and discourage more beetles from attacking the already stressed grass.

Sometimes, the infestation is more than one person can handle. Don’t wait until greedy little grubs fully take over your lawn. Occasionally contacting a professional grub control service is the most efficient means of eradicating grubs.

Grubs not only can raise havoc on a lawn, they also be a nuisance once they mature into a full-scale Japanese beetle population you have to put up with during the summer months.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Who was the last Boston Red Sox player to win the AL Rookie of the Year Award?

Female, left, and male cardinals.

by Roland D. Hallee

My wife has been trying to attract cardinals to our feeders at home for quite some time. Last Sunday she got her wish when a pair of cardinals came in search of food. First, the female showed herself by clinging to a feeding station. A couple of minutes later, the male appeared. I had told my wife when she first saw the female that, for sure, the male was not far away. When you see one cardinal, the mate is always nearby.

It prompted a conversation about how over the last few decades, the northern cardinal, which was rarely ever seen in this part of the country, has become more abundant.

In John James Audubon’s day (1785-1851), the Northern Cardinal was considered a southern bird and was rarely seen as far north as Philadelphia. By 1895, its range reached the Great Lakes, and by 1910, the cardinal was in southern Ontario and along the southern portions of the Hudson River. Some authorities believe the cardinal’s push northward was due to more people feeding birds during the winter and their loss of habitat in its traditional southern grounds.

Today the Northern Cardinal is a year-round resident from the Dakotas, southern Ontario and Nova Scotia south to the Gulf Coast, and from southern Texas westward through Arizona and southward through Mexico as far as Guatemala and Honduras. The Northern Cardinal was introduced in Hawaii in 1929 and is now well-established there. It also occurs sparingly in southeastern California and in Bermuda as an introduced species.

Although nonmigratory, cardinals often gather in large flocks of up to 70 birds during winter months and can be found in bushy thickets in the more sheltered areas of their range.

Northern Cardinals feed by hopping around on the ground and securing food from low shrubbery and trees. Cardinals’ short, heavy, reddish beaks crack seeds with strong abductor muscles that enable them to handle larger and tougher seeds that birds with smaller bills cannot crack. The grooved upper mandible holds the sunflower seed while the sharp-edged lower mandible moves forward and crushes and husks the seed. The bird then swallows the inner nutmeat.

Most authorities believe Northern Cardinals mate for life, but during winter, the male does not allow his mate to feed with him. With the return of spring, however, he regards her in a new light. Then you see the practice of mate-feeding when the male brings shucked sunflower seeds and other choice tidbits to the female. She waits with her wings all aflutter like a baby bird begging for food, and he places the seed in her bill as tenderly as a first kiss between lovers.

Northern Cardinals will eat almost anything offered at feeding stations. Their favorite foods are black-oil sunflower seed, cracked corn, suet, suet mixes, nutmeats of all kinds, melon seeds and safflower seed. The birds’ diet consists of 30 percent insects, which makes cardinals highly valuable to farmers and gardeners. They consume some of the worst agricultural pests: codling moths, cotton cutworms, scale insects, cotton bollworms, grasshoppers, aphids, snails and slugs.

Although cardinals prefer to eat on the ground, they will come to bird tables, trays on posts and trees, window trays, and hanging feeders with perches.

Water for drinking and bathing is just as important for Northern Cardinals in winter as it is during hot months. Remember to keep the water in your birdbath fresh and unfrozen year-round. Because wet cardinals cannot fly quickly to safety, place your birdbath near cover so the birds can escape from cats and other predators. When birdbaths are not available, cardinals bathe in shallow edges of ponds and streams, in snowmelt or in a puddle after rain. Like children, cardinals enjoy bathing in the spray of lawn sprinklers.

Northern Cardinals prefer brushy woodlands, riparian thickets, garden shrubbery, residential areas and parks.

Cardinal nests are compact and well-lined with fine grass or hair, or they might be flimsy and scarcely lined. The birds often use grass, rootlets, weed stems, pliable twigs, vines and bark strips, interwoven with leaves and paper or plastic. Once, when a storm blew the nest out of a bush, a strip of plastic was found in it with the green recycle symbol printed on it. This pair of Northern Cardinals taught me that humans are not the only creatures to use recyclable materials in their homes.

The cardinals have been appearing daily, and it’s our hope they will continue through the summer months.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Name the only three MLB players to have accumulated at heast 500 home runs and 600 doubles during their career.

brook trout

by Roland D. Hallee

The weather has warmed, the snow is melting and the streams are bustling with activity as the spring runoff is in full swing.

On a recent trip to Vermont, my wife and I saw many streams along the route swelling their banks and looking primed for brook trout fishing.

I have been on many a brook trout fishing trip, mostly to Nesowadnehunk Lake in northern Maine where the lake is exclusively brook trout – fly fishing only.

The meat of the brook trout, in my humble opinion, is the best tasting and sweetest of all the fish species, including salmon, probably because they are of the same family of Salmonidae. We have consumed many a brook trout by simply cooking them straight over a wood fired, outside fireplace, with no seasoning whatsoever.

The Eastern Brook Trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, varies in size depending on water temperature, productivity and food sources. Brook trout sizes will range from 7-1/2 to 17-1/2 inches in different lakes and streams. The stream brook trout is slower growing and usually much smaller than their lake relatives.

The brook trout is also known in other parts of its range as speckled trout, squaretail, mud trout and brook charr.

The brook trout has a dark green to brown color, with a distinctive marbled pattern of lighter shades across the flanks and back, and extending at least to the dorsal fin, and often to the tail. A distinctive sprinkling of red dots, surrounded by blue halos, occurs along the flanks. The belly and lower fins are reddish in color, the latter with white leading edges. Often the underparts, especially in the males, becomes very red or orange when the fish are spawning.

The brook trout’s range is varied but are increasingly becoming confined to higher elevations. Their southern range has been drastically reduced, with fish being restricted to higher-elevation, remote streams due to habitat loss and introductions of brown and rainbow trout.

They prefer clear water of high purity and a narrow pH range caused by environmental effects such as acid rain. Warm summer temperatures and low water flow rates are stressful on the brook trout populations, especially larger fish.

Brook trout have a diverse diet that includes larval, pupal, and adult forms of aquatic insects, and adult forms of terrestrial insects. The brook trout we catch at “The Hunk,” as the lake is known locally, had large amounts of crayfish in their stomachs.

Until the introduction of brown and rainbow trout, the brook trout attracted the most attention among anglers, especially fly-fishermen, from colonial times through the first 100 years of U.S. history. Following the decline in brook trout populations in the mid-19th century, anglers flocked to the Adirondacks in upstate New York and the Rangeley Lakes region in Maine to pursue the brook trout.

The world record brook trout was caught by Dr. W. J. Cook on the Ni­pi­gon River, in Ontario, in July 1915, at 31 inches. The weight couldn’t be confirmed because the badly decomposed fish weighed only 14.5 pounds after having been in the bush without refrigeration for 21 days.

Brook trout in North America became extirpated from many waterways due to land development, forest clear-cutting, and industrialization. Streams and creeks became polluted, dammed, or silted. The brown trout, not native to North America, has replaced the brook trout in many of its native waters.

Let’s just hope the many clean, pure waterways we still have in Maine remain that way to sustain the fate of the brook trout in a positive way. In some lakes where brook trout is supreme, we anglers always fear the possibility of other species being introduced illegally. We must remain vigilant.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

How many Super Bowls have the Denver Broncos won?

by Roland D. Hallee

Groundhog day was a little over two months ago. However, this is the time of year when they usually start to make their appearance, emerging from their dens following a long winter of hibernation.

Groundhogs, Marmota monax, also known as woodchucks, are a rodent, belonging to the group of large ground squirrels known as marmots. It was first scientifically described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758.

The groundhog is also referred to as a chuck, woodshock, groundpig, whistlepig, whistler, thickwood badger, Canada maramot, monx, moonack, weenusk, red monk, and, among French Canadians in eastern Canada, siffleux, which translates to whistler.

They are a lowland creature, found through much of the eastern United States across Canada and into Alaska. Adults are 16 – 20 inches long, including a six-inch tail, and weigh between 5 – 12 pounds. Extremely large individuals can weigh as much as 15 pounds.

The name woodchuck is unrelated to wood or chucking. It stems from the Native American Algonquian or possibly Narragansett word for the animal, wuchak. The similarities in the name led to the popular tongue-twister: “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”

Groundhogs prefer open country and the edges of woodlands, and is rarely far from a burrow entrance. It is typically found in low-elevation forests, small woodlots, fields, pastures and hedgerows. It constructs dens in well-drained soil, and most have summer and winter dens.

In the wild, groundhogs can live up to six years, although three years is the average. In captivity, they can live up to 14 years. Humans, dogs, coyotes and foxes are about the only predators that can kill adult groundhogs, with the red fox being the major predator. Young may be taken by owls and hawks.

According to studies, despite their heavy body weight, they are accomplished swimmers and will occasionally climb trees to escape a predator. They prefer to retreat to their den when threatened, and will defend itself with its incisors and front claws. They are territorial among their species and will skirmish to establish dominance.

When alarmed, they will use a high-pitched whistle to warn the rest of the colony, hence the nickname whistlepig. They will also squeal when fighting, seriously injured, or caught by a predator. They will also produce a low bark and a sound produced by grinding their teeth.

They are excellent burrowers, using the burrow to sleep, rear their young, and hibernate. An excavated den can remove about six cubic feet of soil, on average, or almost five bushels per den. They are relatively large and include a sleeping berth and an excrement chamber.

The burrow can be a threat to agricultural and residential development by damaging farm machinery and even undermining building foundations. However, in a June 7, 2009, issue of the Humane Society of the United States, How to Humanely Chuck a Woodchuck Out of Your Yard, John Griffin, director of Human Wildlife Services wrote, “you would have to have a lot of woodchucks working over a lot of years to create tunnel systems that would pose any risk to structures.”

The burrow is used for safety, retreat in bad weather, hibernating, sleeping, love nest, and nursery.

Groundhogs are one of the few species that enter into true hibernation. In most areas they hibernate from October to March or April. They drop their body temperature, the heart rate falls to 4 – 10 beats per minute and breathing falls to one breath every six minutes. Researching the hibernation patterns of groundhogs may lead to benefits for humans, including lowering the heart rate in complicated surgical procedures.

Groundhogs are already used in medical research on hepatitis B-induced cancer. Humans can’t receive hepatitis from woodchucks but the virus and its effects on the liver make the woodchuck the best available animal for the study of viral hepatitis in humans. The only other animal model for hepatitis B virus studies is the chimpanzee, which is an endangered species.

Always thought to be a nuisance species, groundhog dens often provide homes for skunks, red foxes and cottontail rabbits. The fox and skunk feed upon field mice, grasshoppers, beetles and other creatures that destroy farm crops. In aiding these animals, groundhogs indirectly help the farmers.

I had a groundhog living near my garden a few years ago, and he unceremoniously cleaned out all my string beans. Well, I unceremoniously captured him in a Hav-a-Hart trap, and relocated him to the wild, and wished him the best of luck.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Which Red Sox player made an infamous error in the 1986 World Series?

Answer can be found here.

Common raccoon dog

by Roland D. Hallee

Over the past weekend, I read a news release about materials collected at a Chinese market near where the first human cases of Covid-19 were identified showing raccoon dog DNA comingled with the virus, suggesting the pandemic may have originated from animals, not a lab. The World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus criticized China for not sharing the genetic information earlier. It appears samples collected from a stall known to be involved in the wildlife trade also contained raccoon dog genes, indicating the animals may have been infected by the virus.

In China, raccoon dogs are often bred for their fur and sold for meat in animal markets. So, that brings the question, what is a raccoon dog?

The common raccoon dog, also called the Chinese or Asian raccoon dog to distinguish it from the Japanese raccoon dog, is a small, heavy-set, fox-like canid native to East Asia. Named for its raccoon-like face markings, it is most closely related to foxes.

Common raccoon dogs feed on many animals and plant matter, and are unusual among canids (dogs and foxes) for climbing trees and for hibernating in cold winters. They are widespread in their native range, and are invasive in Europe where they were introduced for the fur trade. The similar Japanese raccoon dog, native to Japan, is the only other living member of the genus. Other names for the common raccoon dog include mangut (its Evenki name), and neoguri (its Korean name).

The common raccoon dog is named for the resemblance of its masked face to that of the North American common raccoon. The closest relatives of the common raccoon dogs are the true foxes, not the raccoon, and not closely related.

Due to the fur trade, the common raccoon dog has been widely introduced in Europe, where it has been treated as a potentially hazardous invasive species. In Europe, since 2019, the common raccoon dog has been included on the list of Invasive Alien Species of Union concern. This implies that this species cannot be imported, bred, transported, commercialized, or intentionally released into the environment in the whole of the European Union.

Common raccoon dogs are omnivores that feed on insects, rodents, amphibians, birds, fish, reptiles, mollusks, crabs, sea urchins, human garbage, carrion, eggs, and insectivores, as well as fruits, nuts, and berries. Among the rodents targeted by common raccoon dogs, voles seem to predominate in swampy areas, but are replaced with gerbils in flatland areas.

Common raccoon dogs eat beached fish and fish trapped in small water bodies. They rarely catch fish during the spawning season, but eat many during the spring thaw. In their southern range, they eat young tortoises and their eggs. Insectivorous mammals hunted by common raccoon dogs include shrews, hedgehogs, and, on rare occasions, moles and desmans. In the Ussuri territory, large moles are their primary source of food. Plant food is highly variable, and includes bulbs, rhizomes, oats, millets, maize, nuts, fruits, berries, grapes, melons, watermelons, pumpkins, and tomatoes.

Common raccoon dogs adapt their diets to the season; in late autumn and winter they feed mostly on rodents, carrion, and feces, while fruit, insects, and amphibians predominate in spring. In summer they eat fewer rodents, and mainly target nesting birds, fruits, grains, and vegetables.

After all this, it sounds like the common raccoon dog is a canine garbage disposal.

Wolves are the main predators of common raccoon dogs, killing large numbers of them in spring and summer, though attacks have been reported in autumn, too.

Both foxes and European badgers compete with common raccoon dogs for food, and have been known to kill them if common raccoon dogs enter their burrows. Common raccoon dogs are the only canids known to hibernate.

Like foxes, they do not bark, uttering instead a growl, followed by a long-drawn, melancholy whine.

The common raccoon dog is now abundant throughout Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and has been reported as far away as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Moldova.

In June 2021, a study commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs identified the common raccoon dog as one of 20 invasive species likely to spread to the British Isles.

From what I have been able to find, it looks like the common raccoon dog is not a welcomed species. In its defense, evidence has also been gathered that indicates the raccoon dogs cages may have been stored in that same stall with those of bats, and that the bats are the source, and the raccoon dogs may have become an unsuspecting carrier of the virus.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Who was the last Boston Celtics player to be named the NBA Most Valuable Player?

Answer can be found here.