Forest ranger Frans Kapteijns shares his knowledge of nature every week. Anyone can submit questions via [email protected]. This time Frans focuses on, among other things, an insect hotel and how to protect it against thieves, feces from Sweden, spring crane flies and their mating and a colorful flycatcher near a nest box. Part two of this Stuifmail will be published on Sunday morning.
Poll question
Brabant has many fens and the fens have many names, some of them are called goorven. What explains that name?
- A dirty polluted fen.
- A fen located in a swamp.
- A fen named after the hirsute biologist Gustaaf Goor who first described it.
- A fen that is very difficult to find.
Comments please [email protected].
The winner receives the honor and flower seed in a beautiful jute bag and a brochure with lots of information about national parks donated by the Van Gogh National Park.
You will hear the answer on Sunday between eleven in the morning and noon.
Feces found, whose?
Vincent Relleke sent me a photo he took in a forest in Sweden. His question is whether I recognize the feces in his photo. People there report that it belongs to a lynx. I have once seen a lynx in France, but never the feces of such an animal.
In addition, it is a pity that Vincent did not include a measuring stick. I don’t know now how thick the feces are nor how long. Looking at the feces, I personally think they look more like those of a vegetarian than a meat eater.
For example, I miss hair on or in the feces. That’s why I think of one of the larger ground-walking species in the Swedish forest, I think of a capercaillie.
I immediately grabbed the books. There I read the following about the droppings of a capercaillie: “Capercaillie droppings are large, elongated, sausage-shaped droppings. Often with a white end, from uric acid. They are typically four to eight centimeters long and contain many remains of conifers (pine needles), which indicates their diet in boreal forests. These grouse can often be found on the ground near roosting trees.”
I think the feces that Vincent recorded resemble what is written above. If they are not from the capercaillie, they could be droppings from the black grouse. It also occurs in Sweden.
An insect hotel and predatory great tits, what can you do about it?
A few Sundays ago I talked in the Stuifmail column about smart great tits that rob insect hotels. Great tits are so smart that they empty the brood cells of various bees.
To prevent this, it is smart to hang something in front of the insect hotel. Piet Luksemburg has found a solution for this, see the photo above. Place this mesh about ten centimeters away from the openings. You can also try to lure the great tits to alternatives.
Then hang as many fat balls or other food as possible in another place in the garden. This can distract the tits from the insect hotel.
Is this a spring cranefly?
Margot Reijnders sent me a photo of an insect whose name she had obtained via Obsidentify. It is indeed a spring cranefly. In fact, there are two. What you see in Margot’s photo is a mating of spring crane flies.
Female spring crane flies can measure up to nineteen millimeters in length. Both the male and female have a gray-tinted head and thorax and they have bright green eyes. A beautiful feature of this species is their pattern of dark-colored wing veins. The spring crane is mainly found in moist swamp areas and moist forests.
The adults can be seen from April to June and then live on plant nectar, which they suck. The larvae/breasts of this species also live in the soil and, like many leather jackets, feed on the roots of various grasses.
Is there a pied flycatcher in this photo?
Roy van der Vegt has a nest box in an oak tree. According to him, he sees a pied flycatcher near the nest box. He asks me if that is correct. He also asks me whether the pied kitecatcher is common in the Netherlands. I would like to answer this last question first.
Yes, I think the pied flycatcher is fairly common in our country. Especially on the high sandy soils. For example, on the Bird Protection website you can read that there are approximately 26,000 breeding pairs breeding in our country. This was investigated between 2018 and 2020.
Then the answer to Roy’s first question: yes, he did indeed photograph a pied flycatcher. The males and females are difficult to distinguish from each other, because they both have brown plumage.
White parts can be seen in the rest of the plumage. Because of almost the same plumage you can hardly tell them apart. But that’s different when a pied flycatcher starts singing, because that’s the male.
The menu of the pied flycatcher naturally includes flies, but also other insects such as mosquitoes, butterflies and dragonflies. They also like earwigs – which can also fly – and grasshoppers.
By the way, it is beautiful to see a flycatcher catch prey from a perch. Once they have prey in their sights, the flycatchers leave their perch and make short flights after flying insects. They then catch those insects in full flight.
Pied flycatchers winter in West Africa, south of the Sahara. That is almost unbelievable, because to fly there they have to cover a distance of five thousand kilometers!
Large spider at the front door, what species is it?
Sanne Vlemmings saw a spider at the front door of his house. He would like to know which spider it was. Presumably it is a false wolf spider, but I can’t see it well because the photo is very dark. That’s why I added a photo of a false wolf spider, so that Sanne can compare.
Males of the false wolf spider can grow up to thirteen millimeters in size, females almost two centimeters. That’s quite big. These spiders did not originally occur here, but in the area around the Mediterranean Sea.
False wolf spiders look very much like the wolf spiders we know, hence the name false – not real – wolf spider. These (arthropod) animals hunt flies, mosquitoes and other insect species. They have slowly come to our region from Southern Europe. In their familiar habitat, you will mainly find these spiders under stones or tree barks and in forest areas.
