Outdoor trivia: What did you learn in 2014?

To wrap up 2014, test your outdoor knowledge with the third annual year-end outdoor trivia quiz.

1. Fish use what to obtain oxygen?

A. Mouth

B. Nose

C. Gills

2. Do white-tailed deer have upper canine teeth?

A. Always

B. Never

C. Sometimes

3. What songbird is one of the most tenacious and aggressive when mobbing predators?

A. Sparrow

B. Chickadee

C. Robin

4. Which of the following is one of the oldest fossils on Earth and has a living example today?

A. Horsetails

B. Trilobites

C. Stromatolites

5. Which bird relies on cached seeds to lay eggs in March and to feed the nestlings?

A. Clark’s nutcracker

B. White-winged crossbill

C. Pine sisken

6. Which tree is the fastest growing and largest broadleaf tree in the Inland Northwest?

A. Aspen

B. Birch

C. Cottonwood

7. How do shrews differ from voles, mice and lemmings?

A.Shrews are insectivores while mice, voles and lemmings are rodents.

B. Shrews have pointed noses.

C. Shrews have tiny eyes.

D. All of the above

8. How do caterpillars ward off predators?

A. Camouflage

B. Bad breath

C. Bright coloration

D. All of the above

9. Voles are a major portion of what animal’s winter diet?

A. Great blue heron

B. Wolverine

C. Striped skunk

10. True or False. A boa constrictor lives in Idaho forests.

11. True or False. Hummingbirds feed exclusively on nectar.

12. During summer which insects create a musical chorus?

A. Crickets

B. Katydids

C. Cicadas

D. All of the above

13. How many insects can a swallow eat in a day?

A. 100

B. 440

C. 720

D. 1300

14. Corn, wheat and rice have what in common?

A. They are main ingredients in cereal.

B. They are grasses.

C. They have round or flattened stems.

D. All of the above

15. What swims like a duck, dives like a duck, looks like a duck but isn’t a duck?

A. American coot

B. Northern shoveler

C. Gadwall

16. What animal is the most successful predator in the animal kingdom?

A. Wolverine

B. Dragonfly

C. Great white shark

17. What is the difference between a bug and a beetle?

A. Bugs have piercing-sucking mouthparts and beetles have chewing mouthparts.

B. Bugs undergo incomplete metamorphosis whereas beetles undergo complete metamorphosis.

C. Bugs have a V-shape to their wings whereas the wings of beetles meet in a straight line.

D. All of the above

18. Which cone has prominent three-pronged bracts that extend beyond the cone scales?

A. Douglas-fir

B. Grand fir

C. Western larch

19.The speckled black, white and gray rocks of the Selkirk Mountains are mainly what type of rock?

A. Gneiss

B. Granite

C. Basalt

20. True or False. Frogs swallow with their eyes.

21. True or False. Daddy longlegs are spiders that have enough venom to kill a person but their mouths aren’t big enough to bite us.

Answers: 1. c. Fish use their gills to obtain oxygen from the water. 2. c. Upper canine teeth in white-tailed deer are uncommon even borderline rare at roughly 0.01 percent. 3. b. Chickadees take the lead in announcing the presence of predatory birds and in mobbing.

4. c. The oldest stromatolite fossils date back 3.2 billion years and living examples are currently found in Australia and the Bahamas. Horsetails are found in the fossil record but only back 300 million years. 5. a. Clark’s nutcrackers cache between 35,000 to 98,000 seeds every fall to enable them to mate, nest and raise young. This enables the young time to cache their own seeds for winter.

6. c. Growing in moist areas helps cottonwoods grow rapidly but the trade-off is weak wood. 7. d. Shrews may resemble mice but they are classified differently because they don’t have the characteristic front incisors of rodents. Shrews also have pointed noses, small ears and tiny eyes compared to the others.

8. d. Caterpillars utilize a variety of tactics to ward off predators. Tobacco hornworms’ bad breath keeps predators away and bright colors on black swallowtail caterpillars warn predators of their toxicity.

9. a. A great blue heron’s diet is extremely variable and when shallow waters are frozen, they turn to voles to sustain themselves in winter, along with other small mammals. 10. True. The rubber boa is Idaho’s only boa constrictor and ranges from 14 to 28 inches long.

11. False. Hummingbirds also eat mosquitoes, aphids, spiders, caterpillars and other invertebrates such as fruit flies. 12. d. Crickets, katydids and cicadas create an insect chorus of clicking, buzzing, chirping and creaking using specialized parts of their body besides their throats and lungs.

13. c. Swallows can eat around 720 insects in a day because they eat nearly 60 insects every hour! 14. d. Corn, wheat and rice are three important cereal crops that are grasses and an identifying characteristic of grasses is the round or flattened stems. 15. a. American coots may resemble ducks but they are more closely related to the sandhill crane.

16. b. Dragonflies capture 90 to 95 precent of their prey whereas great white sharks only capture prey 50 percent of the time. 17. d. 18. a. Western larch cones also have bracts but they do not extend beyond the scales as far as the Douglas-fir bracts. 19. b. Most of the rocks in the Selkirk Mountains are granitic rocks. 20. True. Frogs blink when they eat so the downward movement of their eyes pushes on the top of their mouth which helps push food down their throat.

21. False. Daddy longlegs aren’t spiders (but they are arachnids) and they don’t produce venom.

Photo: Dusky grouse can be identified by the red air sacs on their throats and the yellow-orange eye comb.

For previous columns, visit http://goexploreit.blogspot.com