Creatures & Critters on Campus

Some common winter visitors...
Red Shoulder Hawk​​
Canada Geese
The white-tailed deer is tan or brown in the summer and grayish brown in winter. It has white on its throat, around its eyes and nose,  on its stomach and on the underside of its tail. The male has antlers. Males weigh between 150 and 300 pounds and females weigh between 90 and 200 pounds.
​Deer collect in family groups of a mother and her fawns. Female fawns may stay with their mother for two years, males usually leave after a year. Winter is a dangerous time for deer. Their long narrow legs and pointed hooves make it hard for them to move around in the snow and ice and it is easier for predators to catch them.
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​A perennial favorite among people, the Northern Cardinal is the state bird of seven states.  The oldest recorded Northern Cardinal was a female, and was 15 years, 9 months old when she was found in Pennsylvania. A mated pair shares song phrases, but the female may sing a longer and slightly more complex song than the male.

American Wigeon

A compact duck with a short, pale bill and a round head. Breeding males have a wide green stripe behind the eye and a white cap. Females have a warm brown body with a dark smudge around the eye and a pale bill tipped in black.

Mute Swan

  • All of the Mute Swans in North America descended from swans imported from Europe from the mid 1800s through early 1900s to adorn large estates, city parks, and zoos. 
  • Mute Swans form long-lasting pair bonds. Their reputation for monogamy along with their elegant white plumage has helped establish them as a symbol of love in many cultures.
Butterflies are winged wonders! They taste with their feet and have a suction tube for a mouth. They live on every continent except Antarctica. Some can fly up to 37 miles per hour and they can see colors we cannot. Here are a few Fr. Ken found around campus...
The Osprey is a unique bird that is unmistakable when seen at close range. It is the only species in its family, and it is found worldwide.  Fr. Ken spotted 5 on campus and was able to get these great shots! Keep an eye to the sky as you're enjoying the campus.   WARNING: They are enjoying "lunch"​ in some photos!
Ospreys are superb fishers and eat little else - fish make up 99 percent of their diet. Because of this appetite, these birds can be found near ponds, rivers, lakes, and coastal waterways around the world.
​Ospreys hunt by diving to the water's surface from some 30 to 100 feet up. They have gripping pads on their feet to help them pluck fish from the water with their curved claws and carry them for great distances. In flight, ospreys will orient the fish headfirst to ease wind resistance.
Human habitat is sometimes an aid to the osprey. The birds happily build large stick-and-sod nests on telephone poles, channel markers, and other such locations. Artificial nesting platforms are also common in our area. They lay eggs (typically three), which both parents help to incubate. Osprey eggs don't hatch all at once, but are staggered in time so that some siblings are older and more dominant. ​
A few years back the staff watched as a couple of osprey tried to build a nest on the telephone pole.  They couldn't quite get the balance right and were unsuccessful. Perhaps they'll try again this year!

Mallards

Male Mallards have a dark, iridescent-green head and bright yellow bill. The gray body is sandwiched between a brown breast and black rear. Females and juveniles are mottled brown with orange-and-brown bills. ​
  • They nest and forage in a broad range of wooded habitats across their extensive breeding range and eat small insects, spiders, and other invertebrates.​ 
  • The gnatcatcher ​is a very small songbird, just slightly larger than a Ruby-throated Hummingbird.​​
Click below to
hear their song!
Blue Grey Gnatcatchers
​are pale blue-gray birds with grayish-white underparts and a mostly black tail with white edges. The underside of the tail is mostly white. The face is highlighted by a thin but obvious white eye ring. If you look closely at the head, you can just make out a black ‘V’ on the forehead extending above the eye. The males are the only ones who have this distinctive marking. Keep your eye out for this tiny bird before they, like many of you, go South for the winter!
Hundreds of kinds of hummingbirds nest in the American tropics, and more than a dozen in the western U.S., but east of the Great Plains there is only the ruby-throated hummingbird. It is fairly common in summer to spot it in open woods and gardens. Fr. Ken recently photographed this one on the Rosary Walk at St. Bonaventure!

You may spot one in your garden hovering in front of a flower to sip nectar or you can go searching on the Rosary Walk too. 

They are impressive migrants despite their small size, some Ruby-throats may travel from Canada to Costa Rica. These tiny birds are able to beat their wings more than 50 times per second! 

Did you know:
  • Only the males have the red throat, females have a white throat and are larger than the males.
  • Full grown they are only 3.5 inches long and weigh only 1/8 ounce!
  • These tiny birds can fly between 30 and 63 mph!!
  • It is thought that they can live as long as 12 years.
The spring peeper is a little frog with some amazing abilities
They can survive being frozen!  
There’s an advantage to cold tolerance: it lets the peepers emerge early in the spring before predators get their bearings. 

Some basics:
Peepers call in a given location for 4-8 weeks; breeding season stretches from March to June. After mating, the female lays 800-1000 eggs underwater. The eggs hatch in 6-12 days; tadpoles mature in 45-100 days, quicker in temporary pools.
​Small body, big sound.  Peepers are .8-1.5 inches long and weigh 3-5 grams. But for an animal the size of a matchstick and weight of a nickel, they can make a racket – up to 104db when they get together, which is comparable to a chainsaw. The male peeper generates his seductive and ear-splitting peep by closing his nostrils, and pushing air over his vocal chords into the throat sac, which acts as a resonator.
​Despite being fairly large, the spotted salamander is actually pretty hard to, well, spot.  These secretive salamanders spend almost their entire lives hidden under rocks or logs or in the burrows of other forest animals.  The average life span in the wild is up to 20 years!
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​*  Spotted Salamanders return to the same mating pool via the same route every year!
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*  Spotted Salamander larvae will eat anything they can swallow, including their siblings!
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*  Michael Richard has found lots of these around campus, he even found one that was 7 inches long in one of our basements!
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​* Keep your eyes open around campus for these shy guys.
​This is a common garter snake Michael found while doing some yard work around campus. Notice anything different about the snake's eyes? They're blue!  A snake with blue eyes is getting ready to shed. This eye color change happens as a result of skin loosening and fluid building up between the old and new skin layers. At the peak of this transformation, the snake's eyes take on a milky blue or blue-gray color.