Now you see them... Now you don't!

By Al Lowe
Contributor

A lot of wild things protect themselves from being eaten, or attacked, by using colour, or shape, or imitation, or all of them.
Think about birds. Now the females are the ones who usually sit on the eggs, at least most of them. A lot of these females are a sort of mottled brown, light brown, dark brown, buff, and so on. When these birds sit still on a nest, they look a lot like the dead leaves around them, or the dry grass. They blend in! And that's the reason they are coloured the way they are. Most sparrows, grouse, whip-poor-wills, and lots of others just look like leaves. You would never notice them as you walked through the woods.
And some birds, like the American Bittern, do it differently. If he wants to become invisible, or nearly so, he just points his head straight up in the air. Now, he lives in marshes - around those cat-tails, and big marsh grasses. The dark marks on the bittern's body show up as vertical lines - just like the grass around them. The long beak points straight up. So the bittern can disappear by just standing still.
Think about insects. How many of them are green - or greenish? Lots! That is because a lot of insects live on plants. Those green insects, or their larvae, are not nearly as noticeable as if they were some other colour. And some of our larger butterflies and moths have marks on their wings, which look very much like big eyes. The theory is that a bird might mistake this pair of 'eyes' for those on something big, and leave the moth alone.
And some insects mimic others. Here is a really good example. The Monarch butterfly, the big one which is orange and black, apparently tastes very bad. If a Blue Jay eats one of these, he will soon throw it up. And pretty soon, he won't eat any more at all. The Viceroy Butterfly is marked just about exactly like the Monarch. A bird won't eat it because it looks just like the bad-tasking Monarch.
And you will know that most frogs are coloured green, or splotched with green. They live near the water, where the grass is usually green. Toads, on the other hand, are usually brownish, and sort of lumpy looking. They tend to live on drier soil - your garden for instance.
A lot of mammals are quite brown. Even a big animal, like a deer can pretty well disappear, in the forest, by just standing still. If a Bobcat, or a Lynx, moves very slowly, most small game won't spot him at all.
Well, here in Canada, we have some wild things which adapt another way. They do this by changing colour. Summer - brown. Winter - white. The snowshoe Hare is a good example. So are our weasels. In the winter they are all white, except for the tip of their tails. Then they become ermine - much desired, and expensive, for fur coats.
And away up north, we have the Ptarmigans. These grouse - like birds also change colours as the seasons go by. The Snow Buntings which we see here in the winter, are pretty dull - mostly brown and white. But if you were to see the male bird in his breeding feathers, he is quite different, indeed, all jet black and pure white.
Note that most of our warblers, vireos and fly catchers are various shades of green, yellow or brown. They live almost entirely in the deciduous trees, so they blend right in.
And there are some insects which carry mimicry to the extreme. The Walking Stick looks exactly like a dead twig. Some butterflies, when they fold their wings, they look just like dead leaves. Some of those thorns on your rose bushes just might be Leaf Hoppers in disguise!
Nature has many ways of looking after wild things - protective colouration is one of them. I bet you have walked past hundreds of animals without even knowing they were there!