Western Mountains Hunting Report: October 25, 2007

Several experiences over the past week reminded me that both people and wildlife alike are busy getting ready for winter. At home I’ve been working steady to get a garage and breezeway sided and shingled before the snow flies. Next on the list is to gather up a load of firewood from my woodlot for my brother.

Two calls were received this week relative to recent beaver activity causing road problems and access to camps and agricultural fields. Every year we see a spike in this activity as beaver work overtime to impound water, to access and store more food for the coming winter months. Beaver are active all winter but remain in their lodges or swimming under the ice to access the feed piles they created in the summer and fall. Unfortunately, these nuisance activities coincide when biologists and wardens are very busy with the start of several hunting and trapping seasons.

I had my own mini nuisance wildlife problem this weekend while I was putting cedar clapboards on a new garage. While on a ladder, thousands of ladybugs swarmed around me, getting in my hair, ears, and behind my glasses. I vaguely recalled from Entomology 101 that they were predatory so I couldn’t understand why they were so interested in the very wall that I was trying to clapboard. So I called an expert.

Charlene Donahue is an entomologist with the Maine Forest Service. I could tell right off that mine was not nearly the first ladybug call she has handled lately. According to Charlene, these are an exotic (not native) insect, introduced to the southern United States decades ago in order to eat insect pests that attacked pecan trees and other crops. The accurate name for this insect is the Asian Multicolored Lady Beetle. They are predatory, feeding heavily on aphids and scale insects. Though some were released in Maine in the early 1970s, Charlene believes they made their way to Maine from the first introduction down south. In Asia these beetles huddle together in great numbers on cliff faces in order to stay warm. In Maine, large, light colored walls provide the same shelter values as cliffs. Apparently my tall garage wall was just right. Ironically, if they go inside homes, the warmth speeds up their metabolism to the point where they consume their bodily food reserves and die.

So like I, beavers and many other wildlife species, these also are busy times for “ladybugs” in preparing for another cold and snowy winter.