Let’s start 2016 with some nature-related questions and answers, the latter at the end of the column (no peeking).
Questions
1. What two locations in Washington are you most likely to see fossils or dig for them?
2. How many species of birds breed in North America?
3. How do you tell a moth from a butterfly?
4. How many plants and animals did Lewis and Clark enter into their journals?
5. How many delicious insects can a little brown bat catch in an hour?
6. How fast can antlers grow before hardening into bone?
7. About how many quills does a porcupine have?
8. What birds will, if the berries are on the end of a twig and there are several birds, pass them down the line, beak to beak, until all on the branch have a chance to eat?
9. How long can the tentacles of a lion’s mane jellyfish grow?
10. How fast can giant kelp grow?
11. What’s the largest burrowing clam in the world?
12. What is a Ruppell’s griffon?
13. What is a syrinx?
14. If a ruby-throated hummingbird has fewer than 1,000 feathers, how many feathers might be on a tundra swan?
15. Why is it hard to fool a bird when imitating its song?
16. What can jump the equivalent of a 6-foot person (not Superman) leaping 780 feet in the air?
17. How many teeth does a mosquito have?
18. What is Washington’s state insect?
19. What is our state’s smallest state park?
20. How many species are on the state’s endangered species list?
Answers
1. Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park near Vantage has some of the rarest forms of petrified wood.
Dig (for a fee) at one area in the Stonerose Interpretive Center in Republic, which sits on a 50 million-year-old temperate forest.
2. 645 species
3. A butterfly’s antennae have a long shaft with a ‘bub’ at the end.
A moth’s anetennae are feathery or saw-edged.
4. 178 plants and 122 animals.
5. 600 to 1,200 insects.
6. About an inch a day.
7. About 20,000 sharp quills (actually modified hairs with barbed tips).
8. Cedar waxwings. But if they eat too much overripe fruit that has fermented, they can become a little loopy.
9. As long as 100 feet.
10. Up to a couple feet per day.
11. The geoduck, which grows up to 3 feet long, weighs more than two pounds and lives a hundred years or more.
12. A large vulture in Central Africa. In 1973, one was sucked into a jet engine of an airplane flying at 37,000 feet.
13. It is the song organ in the chest of birds, particularly well-developed in songbirds.
14. 25,000, more or less, but who’s counting?
15. Bird songs are extremely complex. Some birds can sing 80 notes per second, and in some birds, a few notes overlap. No human voice can even come close.
16. Fleas.
17. If you are wandering lost in Web looking for an answer, you may read on numerous Web sites that a mosquito has 47 teeth. In “The Book of Facts,” author Isaac Asimov writes that there are 47. Thanks to Asimov, the Internet, and the squabble over what is a tooth, that number may never die. Let’s say that a mosquito has four sets of cutting edges and let it go at that.
18. Green darner dragonfly.
19. Ranald MacDonald Grave State Park near Curlew is only 100 square feet. Many consider him Japan’s first English teacher. The next smallest, at one-third acre, is Willie Keil’s Grave State Park near Menlo. His is one of my favorite stories, worth a trip to historylink.org.
20. There are 29 birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects native to the state on the list, including the brown pelican, fisher, leatherback sea turtle, Northern leopard frog, orcas, Oregon silverspot butterfly, pygmy rabbit, sandhill crane, streaked horn lark.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
