 Okay, welcome everybody. I'm Nancy now the president of Western Maine Audubon. This is the first of three spring talks that we have planned. In addition to tonight's talk. We have in April Stephen crests coming to talk about the restoration of puffins on the coast. And in May we will have someone coming who has been working with peregrine falcon restoration on Acadia. So we're hoping that you can join us for both of those talks. We're trying to be upbeat here with things that are coming back and getting better. Tonight, we are very excited to have Kyle Bonser from Milwaukee. He is speaking about predators as you know. Kyle is a science educator for Chihuahua keys traveling natural history programs. And he most recently has been working as an outdoor school naturalist in this area and also in Ohio. To quick housekeeping things. Nick has wants you to put any questions in the question and answer box please. We'll monitor those and we'll get to most of those probably at the end. And also just so you know this is in webinar format so everybody is pretty much muted and all audio should be off. And as long as the owl doesn't make a lot of noise if he's on your screen. I think we will just turn it over to Kyle. Take it away. Thank you so much for the introduction. Hello everybody and welcome no matter where you are across the state of Maine so happy to be here joining you virtually. As she said my name is Kyle from Milwaukee traveling natural history program, and today we're diving right in self creditors. And so we're going to be meeting a number of live animals today during our presentation. They're going to be all different shapes and sizes with various adaptations special advantages they have helping survive and thrive and help compete other animals in their home. But the thing that links them all together is that they are all predators. And as I think most of us are adults in this particular discussion I won't go too far into the discussion of what those are but predators as a baseline are going to be animals that are hunting and eating other creatures living creatures. And they are going to be the ones that are moving around in their territory, either finding ways of staying hidden and bouncing upon their prey, without running their prey, and then grabbing on to the medications that allow them to consume and quiet. And the things they're hunting the hunted would be your prey. So these creatures are going to sometimes be seen in kind of negative light unfortunately when you hear the word predator, a lot of people assign a lot of negative connotations are negative associations to those words they think of, you know, wiki or cool or, or a killer. But I'm here to teach you that all these creatures are just living organisms that are doing their best to survive to find food, water, shelter and space, and a lot of our association there form from a perspective of fear perspective of maybe the hunting the prey. We want to kind of shift our focus on the amazing adaptations and abilities they have, and the amazing things they do for our ecosystem helping to keep things in balance, and maintaining a part of that natural room. I want to jump into some of our slides I have my friend Colleen hidden behind the scenes, helping to pull up our slides here here's our, our splash page for Chawanky's program. I want to skip right past our expectations page we normally talk about what we're expecting on zoom call and new thread into this first slide thanks Colleen. You probably all recognize this as a scene from one of the classic fairy tales and an example of this negative association forms from old stories in a way kind of propaganda against these predators. We vilify the big bad wolf chasing down little red riding hood here. This story is one of this creature cunning and cruelty sneaking in to the grandmother's house and devouring her dressing up and and waiting lying and waits for this little girl to come home so we can trick her and see her. And of course, predators are not really doing this in real life. The big bad wolf is only big and bad in our minds, because of some associations that maybe early farmers and pioneers had in the creature. You know it was true that if you had a farm you had livestock you were taking care of pets on that farm. The wolves could be a threat. They could cause harm that livestock or there could be a fear that they would. And so, from that perspective, it's easy to see how they can become vilified. But we want to shift that perspective and imagine ourselves from the hunters perspective from from the predator. That wolf out in the forest is looking for food and established in its established territory, moving around, and will come across evidence of humans moving through that territory. And they're going to be finding evidence of fields being cloud out forest taken down to make room for the grain fields that these farmers are developing for their families, not to be mean to the wolves, but to provide for their own families as well. So you're going to find a lot of this habitat loss will affect the wolves very lively wolves as a species are more hunters and canopy the forest, and that open area of fields and meadows is better suited for other animals like coyotes wolves in living in this territory might see the big bad human as the villain of their own personal story. But again, neither of us, both humans and wolves are the bad guys here we're both living creatures doing our best to live. So I would tell them, imagine that you go to your bedroom, and someone left a plate of cookies in there and it's covered up with a little tin, like, oh, that's, that's weird to hear but so great, what a wonderful little treat. And as soon as you take one, so I'm bursting and says, what are you doing with my cookies how dare you we are enemies now, you'd be really confused and not really understand what's going on. And in a way that's what it's like the wolves moving through their territory, they see a farmstead they think, oh, look at this little smorgasbord all these, these animals here behind this little gates, they don't understand property or territory. They don't understand they're doing harm to that, that family, all they care about is providing food, finding shelter and bringing up their own offspring. So we're going to be thinking about these animals, in terms of a new sign of like you want to be thinking about them in new words, removing those negative connotations and focusing on some more positive things. And to start with that, let's jump into our very first predator, one that we won't find in Maine. We'll just take a quick look at this slide of this beautiful cheetah, the spots here, providing a wonderful camouflage in the savannahs where this animal is hunting. Look at those beautiful black lines under the eyes, you'll see this special adaptation or advantage these animals have a lot of creatures that are very speedy, very quick creatures like falcons will have this little dark black line under the eyes. This really cool adaptation is going to keep the sunlight from bouncing up off of the lighter part of the skin and getting into the eyes. I could slow them down if there was a bit of a glare in their eyes and make it harder to hunt. So a lot of creatures that dark eye spot are going to have a better chance moving quickly and seeing at all hours of the day. You see this in football players, we do a little bit of biomimicry here, putting that eye black under our own eyes to avoid that little bit of a glare. I wonder why people do that. That's part of the reason. We're mimicking really cool adaptation. This creature could be seen as cruel or mean or sneaky, but I see a creature that is determined and still being graceful, that is moving through their habitat looking for their prey. And this creature is a carnivore, an obligate carnivore, which means they don't have a choice. You and I are omnivorous. We can eat both fruits and animals. Fruits and veggies, plants and animals. And when we choose to, some people might choose to be vegetarians or vegans, and that's totally cool. We have that ability to kind of choose that lifestyle for ourselves. We're still built to be able to digest both, but we have the means of only eating one together. This cat does not. This is an obligate carnivore, and right here is maybe a little bit of a disturbing slide of them finally catching their prey and consuming that meat, which is rich in a lot of proteins and nutrients. Their bodies cannot produce themselves. They need to acquire this meat and consume it in order to survive. So they don't have a choice. They can't go and just be vegetarians. And they're going to be hunting a wide number of other creatures, their prey, that are living in their particular habitat. In the case of this cheetah, they'd be hunting a lot of creatures, but the next one we're going to show is a field of gazelle. So these beautiful, large herbivores that are grazing and moving around in this territory. I want you to imagine for a moment that you're out in this beautiful habitat with all these gazelle, and they're living their lives peacefully, except for the constant threats of this predator, the sphere of something coming and hunting a pond. From their perspective, of course, that big bad cheetah is the bad guy, the villain. But let's say I snap my fingers, removed all the cheetahs from the picture, made them all vegetarians, they no longer hunt these gazelle. Immediately, those gazelle are going to be like woohoo, there's a party, no more being hunted or persecuted, no more threats of a predator from above. The gazelle are going to increase their numbers very quickly. Their numbers are going to go up and up and up, and they're living in the same sustained habitat, which means those same amount of resources they have. The plant matter that's there in this particular habitat that I'm raising upon is going to quickly go down and diminish as their numbers rise and overpopulation becomes a problem that can cause a major upset in that logical system. And eventually, there may not be enough food to go around, as the next slide will show. This is partially true in the real world. If I were to snap my fingers and make it so there's no predators at all, that would be a very unstable system. You would have a huge imbalance in the number of this population that goes up and then eventually a crash as they complete the resources. It also causes a ripple effect to other animals that live in this particular habitat. Other herbivores, plant eaters that are relying on the grass and greens here would not be able to sustain themselves as well as they quickly lose that resource. And the very sense of vegetation that's here is helping to hold the soil in place and provide nutrients. So without that soil in an area that is overgrays, the rain can wash away the rich soils into the rivers. Widen those rivers up, cause erosion in that area and affects the very biodiversity of that particular habitat. We saw this in an exchange in Yellowstone National Park. When wolves were extirpated from that area, no longer around, they had a change in the biodiversity that was there. And recently, very exciting, when the wolves were reintroduced, they saw that change again. They saw an increase in biodiversity as the wolves hunted the deer and other durazers kept them from raising in one spot to readily. So it kind of spread the love around. And in that sense, the roots were able to maintain the soil and the rivers themselves changed their bend just by having wolves there or not. So a single predator can be an important part of that ecological system and the removal or addition of a predator to a system can have a dramatic impact. So thinking about that, those predators weren't the bad guys. They were just trying to survive and provide for their families and they were helping to remove the weak or the older population of deer, keeping the number of deer that were there more sustainable. Sorry, Gazelle here, more sustainable and healthier, removing the ones that might have been a little slower or inferred, survival of the fittest happens. So again, important distinction of survival of the fittest doesn't mean survival of the strongest. When it comes to predators, survival of the fittest can be a number of different play styles or specs depending on what they're going for. You could be the fastest, you could be the stealthiest, the best at surprising or ambushing your brain. There are a lot of ways to be a very unique predator, and we're going to explore those with a number of different predators that I brought today. So the next one we're going to talk about, you can pull those slides down Colleen, we'll move into our very first predator. It's a very small one that represents a number of predators that live here in Maine, maybe in your own backyard, maybe in your own house, which many of you might not want to hear. This predator gets a bad reputation because of its form of what it looks like and a lot of stories that have kind of painted it in a very negative light. So people that don't have the knowledge about this particular animal can hear stories of them being very scary or very dangerous when usually that's not the case with a growing bit of knowledge. We can learn more about them and maybe have a greater appreciation for what they do and how they're really not as harmful as other people think. The particular creature that I'm talking about today, that first one we're going to meet is a spider. There's spiders all throughout Maine. There are 48,000 species of spiders give or take 48,200 species in the world, which is kind of daunting. You just can't learn all those. But in Maine, we only have about 40 species, which is great. It's doable. 20 of those are your classic web building spiders, the kind you'll see hanging out the web being very patient and waiting for the prey to come to them. You can go in the web and go down, wrap it up, have a little bug snooping. But the spider that we're meeting today represents the other 20 species of spiders that you can find here in Maine, the wandering spiders. These are the sort that are a little more hands on that are moving on the surface of the floor of the whatever habitat they're in, be it field, meadow or forest and springing or pouncing upon their prey to grab it. The spider that I brought is not one you would find in Maine natively. She is a Chilean rose-haired tarantula, a much larger and more dynamic representation of this particular species. Let me switch our camera so you can see her and again a bit of a trigger warning here. The big spiders are at the show up on your screen. She's behind the screen. She is totally benign and harmless, especially to you, again with that distance. And I will actually reach in and show you just how sweet she is. Her name is Parker for Peter Parker. Some of you may know of Spider-Man. It's where she got her name and she can do all those things that our particular superhero is able to do. Climbing up sheer walls, even though it seems to be perfectly smooth, a glass surface, she can climb it with those amazing legs and grabbing on to her prey and shooting webs as well. Well, although, as I mentioned, as a wandering spider, she's not building a web the way other spiders would be to be patient and waiting. She would use her webbing for a number of different things. She might make a carrying case and bring along her egg sap with her. You can see a lot of wonderful Parker. You can see a lot of ground spiders, like a wolf spider's name, doing this. In the time when they have their eggs, they're going to have this little white sap, this little kind of backpack of silk threads that have been wrapped up and they carry them around with them to keep them a little safer. They can also lay silk webbing down on the ground as a bit of a attraction, kind of like a safety net or a line they can use on a slippery surface. You can also lay a thicker webbing down and catch themselves in their own web, which might sound a little silly. Why would a spider catch themselves in their web? But the reason for that would be to emerge from their exoskeleton. This spider has an exoskeleton, a suit of armor around it that's keeping it safe, and it can emerge from that when it gets a little too small for its outer casing and have a new one fresh underneath. But it's kind of hard to slide out of it. Imagine trying to slip out of a tight pair of pants without having use of your hands. You're going to have a way to hold on to that, so they stick themselves to the ground and pop out of it. I'm going to move her aside to show you an example of an exoskeleton right here. This is Parker's exoskeleton that is preserved. Sometimes people will find these dead skeletons of these things that look like a dead spider in their windowsills or around their home and think, oh no, there might be a spider in my house, Brett, not. There are virtually no deadly venomous spiders in Maine. Many of them have a venom that is not harmful to us or have mouth parts that are unable to bite. But in actuality, that spider just left this old exoskeleton behind and popped out larger and better than ever. They can even regenerate lost limbs during this time. They were to lose a leg. They can grow it back during the process of molting out their old exoskeleton. And that is not harmful to us or have mouth parts that are unable to break the skin on humans. So most spiders are not going to be too much concerned. There are a few that can be dangerous, but usually they're not seeking people out. You are not on the menu, as it were. They are insectivores hunting the tangible insects and liquefying their insides with the venom they have. Here's Parker is fanged. She's not defanged. She has her fangs and she is venomous. And I'm going to reach in and show you that she is a sweetheart who would only really bite or defend herself if she felt threatened somewhere. Most spiders are like this. They're just living creatures trying to survive, defend themselves and their families. Most predators are going to be seeking out places that stay safe and usually running away unless they have no other recourse. In this case, they will defend themselves. She has beautiful eight legs that are sticking out. If you're counting, you might think, wait a second. That's 10 legs. For those front two are what we call the petty pups. Kind of like an arm that's going to help kind of part arm part mouth parts. It's going to help her pull her food in to her chelicerae, the mouth part that is on her belly. I'm going to show you that mouth part without flipping her over and that wouldn't make her very comfortable. So I'll leave her be there. You can see her eyes, eight tiny eyes, all together in that one of the spots in the center. It almost makes you look like a cyclops. And in the back, those are her spinnerettes. Two little appendages to help her weave her legs. Because even though she doesn't build a web up in the sky to catch a predator or to catch a prey, she's going to be using that webbing to catch herself and help her to shed that exorcism. The question, why is Parker not considered me a threat? And the reason is, what I'm not being aggressive anyway, I didn't come down and grab her in any kind of aggressive manner. And she's kind of used to us from spending an extended period of time here at our wildlife center. It's been a long time, the males around 10 to 12 years in this female to live up to 25 years, which is much longer than your average spider. And she has a lot of ways of sensing the world around her, most of which being those bristles that can sense vibrations, leaving some chemical changes in the air, kind of smelling and stealing with those bristles. In a way, she could maybe sense that there's no scary chemicals around no scary sense, and also know that in the way that I'm handling her, I'm not trying to hurt her anyway. Most spiders out in the wild to even ones that have never met you, if you are not aggressive if you're not trying to actively grab or hurt them not making any sudden movements. They don't see that as a threat to me usually, again, won't attack unless they have a means to. That being said, a lot of times we'll be bitten and not understand the miscommunication or misunderstanding of their, they may have been close to that animal without even realizing it, maybe even stepping down on an area where there was a homer. I've heard of so many kids telling me that these are hornets are so mean, as they came and stung me for no reason, but they might have realized that a lot of hornets or bees could be ground nesting, and you could have done their hive, or stepped close enough, they felt that there was a threat to their home. So for that reason, again, a lot of it comes out of misunderstandings and miscommunication. And we're the big Jolly Green Giants to them were much, much larger, it can seem very, very scary to their perspective. Bring her just around so you can kind of see those different beautiful bristles on her, those hairs that she has on her legs, have hairs in them, and the hairs in the hairs, have hairs, and the hairs in the hairs, have hairs, and those hairs on the hairs on the hairs will help her to cling to those smooth surfaces. Tiny little grooves, she'll have the extra traction and let her climb, even like a glass panel, or a plexiglass panel, like her enclosure, she's able to climb that with relative ease. But as big as she is, she's kind of fragile, I wouldn't want to bring her up any higher than three or four feet because a drop in that could rupture her body, even though she seems really big and robust. And that can be a little more delicate, and we want to make sure they're staying safe. So I wouldn't have her too high up for fear of her jumping, leaping, and maybe damaging herself. I'm just going to check for any quick questions before I go on. If you have any questions, we'll have some time at the end to answer more about our predators. But for now, I'm going to place her inside and continue on with our discussion. I just want to highlight that predators don't always have to be these big scary beasts that we think of. Sometimes the smallest of animals can be a predator. A predator is simply a creature that hunts other animals and consumes them for food. And so bullfrogs and bats and spiders, all these smaller animals are also predators hunting for creatures in their own. She's wiggling them around. I think she's currently weaving a small bit of webbing beneath there to give her a little bit of extra control as she moves. I'll pick her up. Thanks, Sean. I'll switch us back over here. Welcome back. And we're going to dive right into some physical adaptations, things that are on predators that might help you recognize them as a predator. Adaptations are adventures that help these animals survive and thrive in the nocturnal world or in their particular home or habitat. And the slide that Colleen just brought up is a very adorable shot of the cheetah's cubs, reminding us that just like why they may be vilified by the gazelle and be seen at the big bad cheetah, the big bad wolf. They're doing this for their family, surviving, thriving, providing food, water, shelter and space for their family back home. Thanks, Colleen. You can move to the next slide here as we talked about these different creatures living maybe around Maine. We're going to move into some more Maine native species and talk about the physical adaptations they have in their body to help them locate and acquire their prey. That's the two big things you want to think about when you were a predator. Finding a means of locating your prey with your senses and getting to your prey, either by speed, like the cheetah, or by other means. Like still camouflage or pouncing upon them, and having means of folding on to and consuming them with sharp claws and teeth. When I look at this creature here, and if you want to throw in the comments what creature you think it is or reveal in just a moment, these are species that we have here in Maine. A clue for this is that it is a little less common in Maine than maybe another creature that's similar, but it's a lot more common. There's only about 1000 of these adults in Maine natively right now. And they're more north and western, where I'm kind of the edge of their territory. They have this beautiful body that has this cryptic camouflage that helps them blend in to their natural habitat. That's a really great adaptation for sneaking up in your prey. Not just the prey wants to stay hidden, your predators want to as well, because every little bit of energy you have to run after something is energy you're wasting. If you can wait and let them come to you, it's going to be much, much easier to pitch them. And remember, this is hard to do. Usually, when this particular creature goes out and hunts, they're going to spend four, five, six times trying to catch the animals they're seeking. And I do have the right answer in the comments. Thank you so much. That is a link very good sometimes confused with a bobcat. The bobcat is going to have shorter little ear tufts, a little tufts if you're on the top there, and a slightly longer tail. This particular creature here has longer ear tufts, which can help them sense the world around them. Tell a shorter stub your tail. Those eyes are an important part of locating their prey, and most hunters or predators are going to have forward-facing eyes. Think eyes in the front, they're looking to hunt. Eyes on the prize. It's going to help you find and scan the surroundings with all of your senses at once. So you can pick up any small little bit of movement, any small variation in the habitat there that might be a camouflage in hiding. And those ears on top, big, large ears. You can see that in a lot of wolves, coyotes, canyons, foxes, as well as a lot of prey and almost like deer or gazelle or bats or mice. These big, big ears are going to help to increase their hearing, and they can turn them to focus in whatever direction they need. What I think is really cool about the lynx is those little tufts on top. They're attached to very sensitive nerve endings on the top of the ears there, and they can sense very minute vibrations in the world around them. So when there are creatures moving in a submiviant space, the space under the snow and the leaf that are there, they can sense that. You can feel those tiny vibrations and be able to hunt them more effectively. And the prey that my particular friend, the lynx, is hunting is going to be predominantly the snowshoe here. Next slide. Thanks, Colleen. That snowshoe here there is a great example of the prey that are out there and how their adaptations are just a little bit different. This is a big game of hide and seek out in the forest, and it pays to have the very best adaptations to help you survive and win that game. If you are in the forest as a tiny prey animal with this hair, and you're not quite enough stealthy enough, have the means of locating an animal that wants to hunt you very quickly to get away or freeze, then you're going to get eaten. And if you're a predator and you don't have those means of survival and locating your prey, you're going to go hungry. This snowshoe here have those big ears on top just like the other are listening in all directions and look at where the eye placement is, eyes on the side, you're looking to hide. So eyes in front looking to hunt, eyes on the side looking to hide. This is a much greater field of vision that allows them to see any small movement in any direction around them. They can focus their attention and either freeze in place using the camouflage of their body that cryptic coloration to blend in and hide. We call this catalepsis when an animal freezes in place and uses their natural camouflage to blend in. You probably most understand this from the deer and the headlights effect. If it runs in the road and freezes, it's using catalepsis. If it was in the woods, that would be perfect. In the road, not so much, but an instinct tells them to stand still so they're not spotting. Another instinct might be to run and that snowshoe hair is incredibly quick and short bursts. They use that energy to quickly get away to hide under a burrow and stay safe from the predators. Both the snowshoe hair and the links are incredible. The fur between the toes there and spreading out their weight like a pair of built-in snowshoes keep them off of those thicker areas of snow on the surface so they're not wasting energy and we can move quicker and quickly get away. Amazing. Let's go to the next slide, Colleen, and talk about nocturnal adipose. So day and night can change the world and landscape around us and night affords a cover of darkness. A lot of animals are going to take advantage of it. And if you are living in a world of the night, you have to have means of staying a little warmer, colder, wetter world out there, and also being able to locate your prey when they have this extra veil of the night. So a bat here is not blind. A lot of people hear the expression blind as a bat. They can see just fine, but they rely on those ears in that echolocation to locate prey even in the cover of full darkness. If they were to spy into a cave, it doesn't matter how good your night vision is, without a full town of light, without a little light particle coming in, your eyes can't see. And so even in pitch black darkness, these bats can navigate around through these black mites through the cave, and also ping the little insects with that echolocation and catch them up in those teeth. I want you to think about, again, those two big things, locating and acquiring. We can break it down to three if you want to locate an animal with your senses, to move the animal in some way, and then to grab on to it. So with our bats, they're going to locate with those big, big ears. They're going to move to the animal with their wings to be able to fly very quickly to them, and then grab onto them with a very sharp teeth, or every so often, the little claws there. Animals using their claws and their teeth to sink in and grab their prey. Thanks, Colleen. Can you pull that down? I want to show a few skulls to hammer home that point. As a predator, creatures are going to have means of acquiring, but also tearing apart their prey with their, with their adaptations in the mouth parts. And you and I, technically, are a predator. We are more omnivorous, not a carnivore, not strictly just eating meat, but we were a predator back in the day, we've traveled across the world, hunting a number of charismatic megafauna, some of them to extinction. This is our IP giant ground sloths, but we have the means in our own mouth to rip and tear meat with our canine teeth are in our teeth that are designed for ripping and tearing meat. Don't use your fingers, you can kind of feel your teeth and know you have your insides of the kind of chopping, you've got your canines there for ripping and tearing and the molders in the back for grinding down blades. I have a few skulls with me to kind of show the carnivorous teeth of some of our predators here. This is the skull of a coyote. A species that kind of moved in and kind of filled the niche that was left behind by a loss of wolves in Maine, we'll talk about that in just a moment. But these teeth represent a lot of the canines there, those big sharp carnasal teeth, even in the back, where you have molders that would normally be flat, you're going to see this ripped or serrated edge for tearing through. This is a mouth that is designed strictly for predominantly eating meat. Compare that to a bear skull, which is a little more like our own. This is an omnivorous animal, and they have those big sharp front teeth that are going to help them rip and tear. But in the back, molders that are flat for grinding down plants, very similar to our own. Obviously, our mouth is not as elongated, but you have a means of eating both. And so do a lot of predators. A lot of predators are omnivorous. There are some obligate carnivores that have to eat only meat, and some of the ones we're going to meet today are only eating meat, but others are going to have a little more of a refined and expanded pellet. The next animal we're going to meet is going to be using that expanded pellet to kind of explore and hunt for other animals. And our tarantula friend is exploring around the table here. She's very excited and kind of popping her head out. But before we meet that second animal, I want to show one final animal on a slide. This is an animal that might surprise you, might alarm you. It's another big cat that lives in Maine. You might have some in your own neighborhood, not even know it. Here's some predator. This cat here might get a reaction like, oh, how cute, but it is still a fearsome predator. Remember, size is not everything. And the small mouse, that's a big bad cat out there, hunting songbirds and mice and other small mammals all around Maine. Cats were not native to Maine here, not this domestic version. And they are going to be an introduced species, especially if you haven't had a cat that's going around. A lot of farmers would get cats as mousers and help keep down the rodent population around their farm. The cats can be responsible for killing billions of songbirds every year as a whole. And millions and of these other rodents that would normally be in the food pool for the animals that are out there. So an addition of a predator, just like a removal of predator, can have an impact on that ecological system. We have so many smaller creatures that would be food for other larger animals being removed from that system because of wild or feral cats. And most of the time, these cats don't need those animals. They're hunting on instinct to play and they're getting their own food at home. So small PSA, if you have a cat, I love an indoor cat myself. If you have an outdoor cat, maybe consider a little bell for them, give those other animals a little bit of a head start. An animal that you should maybe really love more than that cat farmers have on their farm natively, but don't get the same kind of love and respect because of folklore and stories and misunderstandings about them will be your snakes. And our next animal that we have is a species of snake native to Maine, one that has gotten more of a sour or negative reputation as a result. Here she comes. Say hello to Adder, our Eastern milk snake. It is an average size milk snake here. They can get approximately the size that they grow up. She is in a very unique state right now. I'm going to show you in just a moment her eyes, which are a little pale and milky, which is not where they get the main milk snake but all snakes undergo this molting of their outer steels or shedding. Similar to how our exoskeleton of the tarantula can pop on off and allow them to grow bigger underneath these snakes and all reptiles are shedding their scales and they get a little too snug and they get a little too old to have a fresher set underneath. The snakes, they're shedding all of those scales at once. These scales are kind of like your fingernails. Go ahead and look at your fingernails. Think about how they're shiny, but they're not wet and slimy. A big myth of snakes is that they're slimy and gross but they're silky smooth. They're soft like your fingernails, dry and silky, soft and hard at the same time, kind of flexible, able to protect your fingers. This is like a chain male fingernail armor even over their eyes, like a pair of built-in goggles, protecting their whole body as they move through your habitat. Because those scales are over their eyes, they don't have eyelids, they don't have a blink, those scales are going to be coming off when they shed their skin and help shed their scales. There's a little slick layer of oil that kind of comes up between the two layers of scales and helps to kind of remove them. And that oil, when it builds up between the scales in the eyes, can make their eyes look kind of a milky blue or gray. You know, how well you can see that there. There you go. She is in the process of preparing for a shed or a molt. And that can be a very dangerous kind of handling a snake that doesn't know you especially. When these snakes are molting, their vision is quite impaired. I keep saying molting, but shedding is more of a common term. When they're shedding their scales here, that vision can be impaired by those scales coming off the eyes. And so a hand coming down, even if it's a friendly one, might look just the same as a big shadow of a talent coming down and a hawk or a larger predator to grab these animals. They are predators themselves and carnivores, but they also have to worry about being hunted or predated upon by other larger animals. And so the most likely time for this particular animal to bite or strike out is out of fear. That's fear and defensive itself. And while we've never been bitten by our friends here, we're always very careful and we usually don't handle them, especially on live programs when they're in the states. But I thought as a virtual program, she only has me handling her. It's a great time to see that adaptation and give you a chance to learn more about it. Snakes make amazing friends to farmers out in the forest. They're kind of a symbiotic relationship, getting the rodents and other creatures that might be a pest or spread disease on a farm and help reduce those numbers. And they are non-venomous. We don't have a single venomous snake in Maine, not since the timber rattlers which were extirpated around the 1870s. There's some rumors in her report of maybe seeing a few coming back from southern Maine, so we may have them eventually returning to Maine, which is kind of cool. But as of now, you're most likely to when encountering a snake in the wild, you're running into one of nine native species of snakes that are all constrictors that are not going to be venomous in any significant way. Look at that face there. Look at that tongue sticking out to smell the world around her. She sticks that tongue out, wiggles it around, gathers up scent particles, draw back to the roof of her mouth where she can smell. It's her own auditory senses that are up there. And she's going to hunter prey by wrapping on, wrapping her body around it and squeezing them in a constricting fashion. They're not going to crush their prey to death so much and suffocate them. They're going to hold onto them really tight until that prey breathes out. They tighten up a little bit so they can't breathe back in. And then once the prey kind of goes to sleep, they're going to swallow it down, head to toe, usually making sure to go with the birds a little harder on their digestion than going backwards there. They can eat an animal maybe three to four times larger than their head because their head can open up quite dramatically. They can't unhinge their jaw, but they can open up with a secondary hinge and let them open, like us, but then open again with that secondary hinge. Open and open to get much wider around them. If you could have a mouth part like a snake, you could eat a watermelon or a Thanksgiving turkey in one big bite. I don't know why you'd want to, but you could. That's pretty amazing. Again, a lot of fear around snakes for just their maybe scary looking nature has led to a lot of mythology and folklore around which is not true. The name milk snake comes from the thought that these snakes would sneak into a dairy and maybe suck the milk out of a goat or a cow. Some even believed that they would curse the cow. A devilish serpent that would cause their cows to go dry or go fallow and not be able to produce milk. And so they were kind of a scapegoat, allowing people to blame it on the snake as opposed to just the natural consequence of something that just might happen in the world. And as a result, a lot of people would fear these animals and kill them when in reality they were helping out in the farm. Even though they're not intending to do it, they're not doing it to be kind. They're just, again, a living creature looking for food, water, shelter and space. My friend Adder here came in looking for shelter in the winter when it got very cold. It's a cold-blooded creature. She can't make her own heat. So she tucked herself away into a nice warm basement of someone's house and snuggled up against a wood-burning stove. That was a little too warm for her. She ended up burning herself along the back. There's a dark line that doesn't really match the splotches there. You might be able to see it right there between those two dark splotches. The spot to her pattern, that stripe on her back, is a burn scar. She was badly burned and had to stay in for multiple sheds of that scales to make sure that she felt healed properly. And once she was fully healed, she was just a little too social. She got too used to people that wouldn't be very safe for her out in the wild. So she became an educational ambassador here at Milwaukee. She's getting a bit squirmy here. Again, if you have any questions, you can add them in the chat or see them for our Q&A. I'm going to place her back and we'll move on with our discussion. And since we were just talking about these creatures that were native to Maine maybe extirpated, like our timber rattler, I want to focus on one that is kind of in the news right now. The wolves and how they were once upon a time a very abundant and native species to Maine. The wolves ruled over the forests of Maine, they hunted under the campy, and when pioneers came and settlers were cutting down and forcing certain areas of their farmlands and also killing these wolves out of fear of them, greatly diminished their population numbers. The wolves had that big bad wolf reputation, the story spread for a good reason, as these wolves would hunt livestock and cause problems for farmers and hunters in the area. And so, there was a bounty placed on these wolves head, a certain number of coin was offered for pelts of the wolf. And you can see a picture here of, unfortunately, dozens of wolf pelts lined up as they were hunted very quickly out of Maine. And where extirpation is a fancy way of saying they were hunted to essentially local extinction, they're no longer any wolves native to Maine. With the exception of a recent discovery found I believe November of last year with some scats found in the forest that was identified as having a large percentage of wolf DNA. I believe it was most likely a wolf coming down from Canada, moving into Maine as part of a new established territory. There's a lot of discussion and question of whether or not wolf was just kind of sightseeing, moving down and travel back out or that is living here now in Maine, and we're seeing a reintroduction of the wolf species coming back to Maine. And that opens up that age old question and discussion of, do we want wolves back in Maine? And for conservationists and people that love to see that ecological biodiversity and richness, we definitely say yes, yes, bring them back. Let's see a reintroduction of the species, but understandably so for farmers and hunters and people who those wolves could affect their livelihoods of the livestock. There's got to be a balance that has to be a way of keeping those wolves in areas that they can hunt effectively, that it can be protected, but also not harming or causing concern for the humans that are living in that area. So until that discussion really gets really fleshed out until we think of a way that we can live and peacefully coexist together, it's kind of difficult to say we should just quickly bring them all back. But hey, maybe happening naturally over time as we're seeing some of these changes in the population. We also see strange changes happening in terms of hybridization. There's been talk of wolves and coyotes interbreeding and forming coyotes that are larger coyotes that can make use of the open plains and fields. These are better suited for a number of different habitats. They're more adaptable than the more forest-centered wolf species. So we may see a wide variety of changes happening over time. We're seeing where in Canada is the closest to main wolf population. I'm not native again. I don't know a lot about the territories happening up there. I do know that in southern Canada there are a number of wolf populations around there. And so it's not a stretch of the imagination that the territory could extend and they could find their way south here to Maine. But in terms of specifics, I don't know that. I can try to speak more on that as we go into our Q&A, but I'm not entirely certain on that. One creature that I'm more certain on and our final creature we're going to meet today is one that hasn't gotten that negative mind with a negative perception. This is a creature that is native to our forest of Maine. It's a creature that hunts more in the dead of night. And it is a creature that is flying far above what I need to use my own protection when bringing out because this creature is a larger predator that has adaptations that could cause me harm. And notice I put on a glove. This little glove here is going to protect me from the very strong talons of our final creature at owl. We're going to bring out the largest and oldest wildlife ambassador that we have here at Milwaukee. He was born in 1994. He came to us, found underneath some high-density power lines and believed to have been struck by those lines of hunting and damage to the queen. That's why he lives with us as an educational ambassador. Everyone say hello to Sparky, the great horned owl. Sparky here has a physical handicap that prevents him from going back to the wild. So if Sparky, can you put your wings up for me? You have to see that big, broad wing there. Those big, broad wings allow them to fly by silent. And he has a wingspan three times larger than its height. But both wings didn't extend because the wing on this side is no longer functional. When he damaged that wing and broke almost every bone in that wing, his first year of life, he was able to have that recovered. He was taken to a rehab center and that rehabilitation center was able to put a cast in that wing, allow him to heal. When that wing healed, the joints kind of stiffened up, became a little harder to move, and he's not able to operate that wing anymore. He can extend it fully so he can no longer fly. And without being able to fly, he wouldn't be able to hunt successfully and compete in the wild, which is why he lives with us as an educational ambassador. He is 27 years old, which is remarkable for a great horned owl. He lived to be about 25 on average in the wild, 20 to 25, is getting up there in old age for an owl. Usually, sad to say, four out of every five first year owl won't live to see their second year. They won't live to see year two because of competition, lack of resources, finding an establishment territory, a little bit of human involvement, just rough to be an owl. But once you get that established territory, once you have an adult owl in a home knowing what he's doing, they can live much longer. Their survival rate goes way up. And then eventually, if they get a little older, they start to slow down, they could be predated upon by their animals, or they might have a hard time finding food, which is why the numbers kind of level off at 20 to 25 in the wild. We expect our friend Sparky here, who's spent every day with a little butterball, and has a great enclosure that keeps him safe, is going to live much longer than the expiration dates in the wild. And Sparky's a great example of those adaptations you can see on predators. Look at that big beak, it's like partially open up there, so you can see how wide that is, as he gives me a little nibble there. The big curved beaks like a built-in viking fork are cutting and tearing larger prey in smaller chunks. He's not grabbing with his beak, he's hunting with those talons. His limbs are going to help him acquire his prey. Big, strong wings are carrying him there, and big, strong talons for capturing and grasping his prey, and that beak for ripping and tearing him up. His big, big eyes there are about as large as my eyes in a much smaller frame, and they're going to allow him to locate his prey with vision eight to ten times better than us. So an amazing sense of sight, an amazing sense of hearing, his whole face is like a built-in facial disk there, a chilling sound to his ear holes in the side of his head that allow him to hear his prey from over a half a mile away, which is incredible. If a little mouse squeak on the other side of a football field, I had a hard time hearing it, but he could. And they can hear differences in the sound that these rodents make, a mouse or a bull or a shrew, all my different sounds that they scurry, and they can associate those sounds and know what to hunt with, whatever he likes. They've even been reported to be able to hunt pregnant mice over non-pregnant ones preferentially, which is incredible. They can hear a little difference of a pregnant mouse in the dragon's belly on the forest floor and know to hunt for that, because it means more food. So incredible senses to help them locate their prey, incredible means of acquiring their prey through getting there by flying down and then grasping and then using that. And this is not a hunter that is spending a lot of energy flying around and wasting time. There are perch and pounce hunters waiting in place using that natural camouflage blend in. When they fly, their feathers that look fluffy and fluted or frayed on the edges are going to be very silent and quieter than a moth in flight while they sneak up and grab their prey. I'm going to keep Sparky out and bring us into our Q&A section about our friends Sparky or about hunters and predators in general. So think about predators and maybe how some of them can be seen again with that negative light how they want to shift our focus there. Think about them as just living organic creatures out there trying to survive, not being mean or cruel, but just trying to defend themselves. And how our expectations or our stories we tell about them can change the way we see them. I bet no one would go out there and be like, oh, it's a big bad owl. Most stories have owls as the heroes as wise keepers of knowledge as a messenger and Harry Potter. These legal creatures that look maybe cuter or four feet or less than maybe the spookier snakes and spiders. So, our owl friends got the good side of the publicity stick, but we want to shift that focus on other animals too. I'm asking a question from Carolyn Roger, what is our milk snake here at Chawanky? We feed our milk snakes mostly mice that have been unthawed. We keep a large supply of frozen mice that we thaw out and warm up the temperature. And then they get fed once every two weeks, which seems crazy, right? I would be hungry if I had to wait that long. But as a cold-blooded or ecothermic creature, they're not burning energy every day to keep themselves warm as we are. Every time we eat food, part of that breaks down for energy, and some of that leads us late to keep us warm. Birds and mammals are going to be warm-blooded creatures that are constantly burning energy, constantly have to replenish the food. But cold-blooded creatures, they don't spend a lot of energy, and especially during wintertime, they can brew mates, just kind of like hibernation, slow way down, and they can go even months without eating. Do Sparky's talons have to be clipped? We do. Make sure to give our animals monthly health checks, and that will sometimes keep us coping or clipping the talons and the beak. In the wild, that would be naturally worn down as they're going around on different surfaces, the trees, rocks in the ground, and as hunting, just a general wear and tear would wear those down over time. But in captivity, he's not moving around as often as he would in the wild, and so sometimes the beak gets a little long, and you might even notice it looks a little light on the edge there as we've cooked down and kind of keep it in a better form there. If it's too long, it can cause him problems, even closing his beak, which he would never want. And same with the feet too, if they get too long and curl, that could be hard to stand on to cause problems for him. He could even puncture himself on the base, which would cause a lot of other issues. So monthly our animals are all checked out, make sure they're healthy, we're weighing them weekly, making sure they're all staying within the appropriate list. Stay safe and healthy. I see a question from from Pete here, I've seen and heard owls at night in the woods. Why don't I see them the day of the treats? Great question. Owls are cavity nesters, so they're usually going to be hiding away in holes and trees. They don't nest the same way that eagles or hawks would. So instead of having a big nest out on like a branch or an open area, they're going to be tucked away and hidden. And if they're tucked away inside of their little tree cavity there, even with their heads sticking out, it can be really hard to spot. He's showing off those dynamic kind of patterns on his back where those different colors help him critically blend in with the trees. As a perch and pounce hunter, he's hanging out really close to the base of the tree and the bark of the tree blends in really well with his coloration. It's a really, really difficult spot even at night when they're out and about. He's showing off that gular flutter right now. We're under some warm studio lights and he's wearing a built-in winter coat, so he's kind of panting to cool down. High sweats to cool down, like most mammals, but he has to breathe air over his tongue, strong and back and forth over the wet tongue to evaporate that out. Check to see are there forest characteristics that owls are attracted. Owls are going to have certain preferred habitats just like other predators. Like I said, wolves prefer a deeper, more forested area over the coyotes, which can hunt more open areas of the habitats. With a great horned owl, they can be found in a lot of different habitats, jungles and forested areas, and they're going to need open wooded areas with some meadows and groves they can hunt down on. In terms of the different kinds of barked-up trees, there's not any known preference for one particular tree or the other that would give better camouflage. But you do see other kinds of owls, like barn owls, for example, having different colors and preferring different habitats. A barn owl was not native to some areas like Maine or Ohio when they were fully forested because they need larger open fields. And I'm from Ohio originally, as was mentioned, we would see barn owls much more commonly nowadays, but they weren't there before farmers took down the forest in those areas and opened them up for farms. So barn owls move in those open barns, like open cavities, just like an old tree cavity, and they love those open fields of quartering over the fields of the green. So different owls are going to prefer different types of habitats, but not particularly like different trees. I would say old trees that can have big open holes in them would be preferred mist insects. So we have an old oak tree or a tree that had like a big limb that fell off and has an exposed cavity there. Or sometimes for smaller owls, trees that have woodpecker holes in them are open wide enough, it has its exposed cavity to be a great placement of owls and mist. Oh, you asked Sparky to open his wings and he did. Yes. So that is a bit of a magician's trick. And since we're all friends here, I'll kind of fill you in the trick. Sparky is not a trained bird. He's not smart. We call these owls wise keepers of knowledge, but they're really bird doing no offense. Small, small brain in there almost a little smaller to the same size as his eyes. His eyes are so big to pick up just too much space for a big old brain. And so he's really good at instinct and knowing how to survive in the forest. Part of that means balance. You might see how it's back to back and forth and his wing comes out as that tree branch or my arm means to get him to put his wing out. I just have to tilt my hands slightly to just put him a little off balance wing out. I don't do it too often because I don't want to put him off balance and cause many distress, but every so often he's kind of used to that for giving a little way. That's a great way to show off that big broad wingspan. These owls can have a wingspan between three to five feet on average. You're going to see smaller owls, the great horn owls down south, or closer to the equator where they're a little warmer. This is called Bergman's rule. Bergman's rule states that the closer you are to a very hot space at the equator, you want to be small and slender to let that heat out much larger surface area. The closer to the poles where it's very cold, it's going to be big and bulky to have a smaller surface area and more kind of meet on the inside and keep yourself warm. So bigger animals seen up north were mammals. That's why they have big, big mammals like moose and we have these big, big owls of the wingspan four to five feet as opposed to say three to four feet down south. When do we expect to see snakes coming back out in spring? Once we start having warmer weather where there's nice warm days with lots more lights and you have those rocks and logs being warmed, it's the time when snakes are coming back out. They don't have a full hibernation cycle. They're not sleeping all through the winter. Brumation means that on a nice, nice warm day or a bright day, it kind of triggers them to like, oh, maybe I could find some food today. Maybe I could get a little water and a wake up and explore. So once we start having some nicer days that are like a little warmer all throughout the day, don't have as much frost and snow on the ground, we'll start seeing those snakes returning to logs and rocks. Keep an eye out for them. It won't be out fully until winter fully goes away because once it gets cold again, we'll tuck that down under the frost there to stay safe in those hibernation. Trying to make sure, and if there are any questions I missed, I'm going to kind of stand back and look. Are yellow sac spiders native to Maine? I do not believe so, but I can double check. There are 40 species of spiders native to Maine, 20 of them are red builders, 20 of them are your wandering spiders. 10 of those wandering spiders are jumping spiders, different species of jumpers which are simple, one of my favorites. And then for web building spiders, about half of those are orb-weavers. It's your garden orb-weavers, the ones that build a really fancy spiral spider web you're used to. Others have more of a tangler. And the yellow sac may be one of the tangler ones, but not entirely certain. I could probably give you an answer in a few moments if I look it up. I have like a full list that I've kind of written out to myself. I don't believe the yellow sac is native to Maine, based on what I'm seeing here. I could be wrong though, maybe my friend Colleen who is behind the scenes can look it up and double check for me. Are we doing Kyle? Are there more questions or are we coming to the end? I think we're coming to the end. I was just standing through our senior to see if there are any questions I missed, but I really appreciate all your curiosities. And I hope that you learned a lot about the predators we had today. Our tiny little spider represents those spiders we can find in Maine. Our milk snake, which is a native species here to Maine, one of the nine species that we have moving around the forest. And our big kind of a charismatic predator here are the Great Horned Owl native to Maine, and the largest owl we've had in Maine year round. You can see larger ones like your snowy owl that don't live with us for religion. It would be migrating in during certain times of the year. Well, thank you very much. I know that when we first started to plan this, we were going to have you come with the animals. You know, and we would have all been together, but you've done a wonderful job presenting them on screen and presented a lot of knowledge to us and we really appreciate your presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. You can see my friend's getting a little warm under the lights. I'm going to put him back. But thank you again for having us. And I hope you all have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you all for tuning in and we'll see you in April to talk about Huffins on the Coast.