First off to make this legitimate.  I had a flock of around 170 tundra swans flying over as I walked out the door this morning in North Perry.  There should be a great movement of birds on the lake today. To respond to Becky's question about earthworms.  Worms disappeared from parts of Ohio with the glaciers.  Unglaciated Ohio would have native worms.  In Northeast Ohio, work by Cleveland Metroparks and others have identified at least 17 species of earthworms.  All have origins in Europe and Asia, none are native.  Several of these species are doing a tremendous amount of damage to the forest.  Others species are more benign.  The bad ones devour the duff layer of the forest and all of the leaves on the ground.  Duff is the layer that consists of years of accumulated leaves and other plant material.  This is the layer where a lot of macroinvertebrates, salamanders, and other creatures reside.  The duff layer is also the "skin" of the forest floor.  It helps protect the soil b
 elow from a number of environmental factors.  Earthworms are a very real problem. In some of our forests in Lake County the duff layer is gone and the leaves that fell the autumn before are gone by July 1, leaving bare ground.  Needless to say, not a good situation for ground nesting birds like ovenbirds and hermit thrushes.  In areas where we have worm damage we also are not seeing maple, tuliptree and other native tree seedlings.  This leaves a forest floor that is often barren.  I say often because there are sometimes scattered woody plants.  The problem is they are non-native species, which do well in these worm areas.  It's not surprising as invasives are from the same place as the worms.  I have read several articles where they mention garlic mustard does not occur in woods that have no worms.   I do occasionally run into areas where there are maple seedlings.  These areas of maple seedlings are often very dense and stop as if there is a wall.  If you check the center!
  o
 f the maple seedlings there is a good duff layer.  Get away from where the maple seedlings are and there is no duff.  At the boundary it is clear that the worms are slowly invading. If you are birding your favorite woods and want to know if you have a worm problem, just kick away the newly fallen leaves.  If you see bare ground with a bunch of skeletenized leaves you have a worm problem.   From what I am seeing, worms are doing more damage to the forests up here than deer.  Couple worms and deer and you have a lot of problems.  For more information check out:  http://www.nrri.umn.edu/worms/ John PogacnikBiologistLake metroparks

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