Things I’ve Seen

Pine bark beetles (Ips pini) made an intricate design on a white pine (Pinus strobus) limb. These beetles are small and range in size from about 1/10 to 1/4 of an inch in length, but they can do a lot of damage when enough of them are in a forest. They feed on the phloem tissue just beneath the bark and if they girdle the branch it will die. Dead branches mean no photosynthesizing and eventually the tree will die. For those who have never head the term; girdling of a branch or tree happens when the phloem and bark has been cut around its diameter in a complete circle. Native Americans and then early settlers used girdling to remove trees from fields and pastures and it is still used by some today.

I saw a beautiful drift of gray and green reindeer lichens recently. This shrubby lichen gets its common name from the way reindeer and caribou paw through the snow to find and eat it. Reindeer lichen reproduces vegetatively by small growths called soredia that break off and grow new lichens under the right conditions. The soredia are carried by wind, water or animals. Reindeer lichens grow about .31 inches (8 mm) per year so it’s clear that this drift has been here for a very long time. They can live for a century or more and studies have shown that only boiling and radiation caused severe damage to them. There are many who believe that lichens are virtually indestructible and are therefore immortal.

Reindeer lichens remind me of corals that you would see under the sea. The grayish white color and the way that the branch tips all point in one direction tell me that this one is gray reindeer lichen (Cladina rangiferina.) I find the biggest colonies of this lichen along the edge of a pine forest, growing in a very thin quarter to half inch of dry sandy soil over granite bedrock. At times they get so dry that if you walk on them it sounds much like it would if you walked on potato chips. I’ve read that reindeer lichens produce a single new branch each year and that their age can be determined by counting the branches. The plants pictured must have been very old indeed. I’m glad that I didn’t have to count their branches.

Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) grew into the top of a tree and then found that it had nowhere else to climb so it massed in the tree top, and its bright red berries show that. Bittersweet is very persistent and will simply grow or hang back down until it reaches the ground and then creep until it finds something else standing vertical. As it grows the vine winds tightly around the tree trunk and doesn’t expand when the tree does, so its wire like strength will eventually strangle the tree. This is why its sale and cultivation are banned in New Hampshire.

Blueberry stem gall always reminds me of a kidney bean. This gall forms when a shiny black wasp called Hemadas nubilipennis damages a bud while laying her eggs on a tender shoot. The plant responds to the damage by growing a kidney shaped gall around the eggs, and this is where the larvae will overwinter before emerging as adults in the spring. This example was a highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) but this wasp isn’t choosy and will also use lowbush plants (Vaccinium angustifolium.) The galls do no real harm to the plants.

This witch’s broom on a highbush blueberry looked very red. It’s interesting that the highbush blueberry’s leaves turn a beautiful red in the fall and the stem galls and witch’s broom are also red. Why so much red present, I wonder. Witch’s broom is a deformity that causes a dense mass of shoots to grow from a single point. It’s not caused by an insect but by a fungus called Pucciniastrum goeppertianum. This fungus spends part of its life cycle on the needles of balsam fir (Abies balsamea) so bushes should never be planted near fir trees. When the fungus releases its spores and they land on the stems and leaves of the blueberry, the bush becomes infected. The fungus overwinters on the bush and in the spring again releases spores which will infect even more balsam fir trees, and the cycle begins again. The disease infects the entire plant so pruning off the witch’s broom won’t help. I’ve worked on blueberry bushes that have borne large amounts of fruit even though they had witch’s broom, so I’m not sure how much the deformity harms the plant. I think it’s more offensive to the eye than anything.

A water lily leaf was trapped in the ice just off shore in a small pond. It tugged at me and I thought it might make a fine picture, but it looked much better in person than it does here.

Do hornets care that what they build is so beautiful, I wonder?

There was a time that I thought I had some artistic ability and I’d sit for hours drawing and painting. One of the things I loved especially was pen and ink drawing, and that’s what this burl I found on an old tree stump reminded me of. It looked like a Da Vinci sketch in pen and ink with a colored wash over all to add some depth and character, and how beautiful it was. I think the old master himself would have been pleased to see it.

For those not familiar with burl; it’s an abnormal growth that grows faster than the surrounding tissue. Scientists don’t fully understand why it happens but burls are thought to grow on trees that have been weakened by stress or damage.  Once the tree’s defenses have been weakened insects and /or fungi can attack and cause the abnormal growth. Woodworkers make some very beautiful things from burl and prize burls highly. Bowls and other objects made from it can sometimes sell for thousands of dollars.

I found this colony of wooly alder aphids (Paraprociphilus tessellatus) on an alder limb. These insects can be winged or unwinged and need both silver maples and alders to complete their life cycle. Eggs overwinter in crevices in the bark of silver maple trees. In spring, nymphs hatch and begin feeding on the underside of new leaves. In late May through July, they develop wings and fly to alder trees where they feed on twigs and begin reproducing. Soon the colony is composed of aphids in all stages of development and becomes enveloped in white, fluffy wax as seen in the photo. Some aphids mature, return to silver maple trees and mate. Each mated female lays only one egg, which once again starts the overwintering stage.

Wooly aphids are sap sucking insects that secrete sweet honeydew on branches and leaves of plants. The honeydew attracts a fungus called black sooty mold. Since the mold only grows on the aphid honeydew and not the plant, it doesn’t harm plants. In fact the aphids will do far more harm. I’m not sure if the aphids with dots in this photo always look that way, if they haven’t grown the white waxy covering yet, or if they’ve lost the covering for some reason. They were very small; not even pencil eraser size.

I love seeing juniper berries at this time of year. A waxy coating called bloom makes them a bright and beautiful blue. I always wonder how many gin drinkers know that the unique flavor in their drink comes from this plant’s fruits. Though they’re called berries, botanically speaking juniper fruits are actually fleshy seed cones. Unripe green berries are used to flavor gin and the ripe, deep purple-black berries are the only part of a conifer known to be used as a spice, often used on game like venison, moose and bear meat.

Part of what I try to do on this blog is show the amazing and beautiful things that are tucked into virtually every nook and cranny of nature and, with nothing but a slower gait and a watchful eye, how easy they are to see. Walking along at a toddler’s pace and looking at logs is just how I found the unknown fungi in the above photo. I knelt to give them a closer look and saw that they were like nothing I’d seen. Finding unexpected beauty like this can take us to that higher place where time seems to stop for a while. Sometimes it’s hard to know how long you’ve been there but that’s okay; as Mehmet Murat ildan said: “If you are lost inside the beauties of nature, do not try to be found.”

Mushroom mycelium grew on the bottom of a log where it made contact with the soil. It wept golden nectar and its many intricacies reminded me of distant cosmic nebulae where stars and planets are born.

He who does not expect the unexpected will not find it, since it is trackless and unexplored. Heraclitus of Ephesus

Thanks for stopping in.

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Local Scenery

I don’t think I’ve ever shown much of what our landscape looks like in November. Some people think there’s nothing worth seeing at this time of year; that everything is either brown or white, but that simply isn’t true and I hope the following photos will prove it. I don’t usually do too much landscape photography because I find it much harder than any other kind and because I’m not that good at it, but I probably can’t lose by starting off with Mount Monadnock. A three year old couldn’t mess up a photo of this mountain from this spot.

3,165 ft. high Mount Monadnock has bald granite on its summit because a fire set in 1800 to clear the lower slopes for pasture got away from the settlers and burned every tree on its summit. Between 1810 and 1820 local farmers thought that wolves were living in the blowdowns left from the first fire, so they set fire to the mountain again. This fire raged for weeks, burning so long and so hot that it even burned the soil, which the wind and rain eventually removed, leaving the bare granite that we see today.

Monadnock is the most climbed mountain in the United States and the second most climbed in the world after Mount Fiji in Japan. It’s not unusual to find standing room only on the summit on a fall weekend, but on this morning it looked like one climber had the whole thing to himself. I’d bet that it was pretty cold up there and that probably kept people away. It won’t be long before it’s covered by many feet of snow.

Something that really says New Hampshire to me is a field surrounded by stone walls. The stones were found when the field was being cleared and to get rid of them the farmers put them along the edges of the field. Stone walls built in this way are among the earliest and most common, and are called thrown or tossed walls since that’s how the stones were put there. Since forests were being cleared rapidly wood for fencing was in short supply and stone walls eventually replaced the earlier wooden fencing. If the field was used as pasture wooden rails were often added to the tops of stone walls to keep animals from jumping over them.

Laid walls took more care and time to build and were often used for show along the front of a house or other places that were seen by the public. They are more orderly than dumped or thrown walls and show the skill of the builder.

This wall had a gate with granite gate posts. You don’t see these very often.

I’ve been walking in these forests almost since I learned how, so I can’t think of this state without thinking of them. New Hampshire has 4.8 million acres of forest so the woods become a big part of life here. Big open spaces are rare and often have cows in them.

I should have said that I’ve been following trails and old logging roads through these forests since I learned to walk. Though I’ve done it in the past just walking into these woods with no trail to follow is a very foolish thing to do. The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department handles between 150 to 200 search and rescues each year, and many are lost and / or injured. Besides, I love walking the old forgotten roads because there is often a lot of history to be found along them. Stone walls and cellar holes tell an interesting story.

If there’s one thing New Hampshire has plenty of it is water, and even in a drought most of the streams run. The water is clean and clear and many people still fill bottles with it at local springs. I like to just sit and listen to streams chuckle and giggle as they play and splash among the moss covered stones. At times nature is like a little child and this to me, is that child’s laughter.

The Ashuelot River is also fairly clean now but it wasn’t always that way. I can remember when it ran all colors of the rainbow, depending on what color dyes the woolen mills happened to be using on any given day. To now see people catching trout in this river and bald eagles nesting along its course seems truly miraculous to me.

I like going to see parts of the Ashuelot River that aren’t that familiar to me like this section up in Gilsum, which is north of Keene. I particularly like this stretch because of its wildness. Major floods tore through here a few years ago and scrubbed the river banks clean of soil right down to the bedrock in places. A steel suspension bridge that crossed near this spot was torn loose and wrapped around trees and boulders like it was made of aluminum foil and pieces of it can still be found bent around various immoveable objects to this day.

But enough about flooding; I prefer the placid waters of our many lakes and ponds. I was thinking as I started putting this post together that I can’t think of a single town in this region that doesn’t have a lake or pond, and most have both. The pond pictured is Wilson Pond in Swanzey last Saturday at sunset.

Other things we seem to have a great abundance of, at least in this part of New Hampshire, are hills. In fact Keene sits in a kind of bowl and no matter which direction you choose to leave it by, you have to climb a hill. So of course I wanted to show you hills, but I found that photos of hills in November aren’t very exciting. On this day though the setting sun in the previous photo turned the sky a peachy color and the hills a deep indigo blue, improving their appearance considerably I thought.

As the sun continued to set the color of the sky became richer and deeper. I was driving home at the time and had to keep stopping to take another photo because we don’t see skies like this every day. It was so beautiful that I spent more time just sitting and staring than I did taking photos. This kind of beauty isn’t just seen; it’s felt as well, as if you are bathing in it, and I don’t see how anyone could have room for anything but peace in their hearts after witnessing such a display.

Just to see if I could do it all of the photos in this post were taken in one day, and what a day it was. But as every day must this one had to end, and I just happened to be near a stream when the light began to fade. I expected the pink and orange reflected sky but I didn’t expect the beautiful blues. A perfect end to a perfect day.

If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. ~Tecumseh, Shawnee

Thanks for coming by. I hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, or just a plain old good day if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.

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Pond Mud and Other Wonders

As any parent of a male child will tell you, boys have an innate attraction to the muddy shores of rivers and ponds and though you might use every trick in your parental bag of tricks, you’ll never keep them from exploring it. There really isn’t anything to worry about though because most boys grow out of their mud exploration phase. Since I never did I recently decided to visit the shore of Wilson Pond in Swanzey. They draw down the water level there each fall so people can maintain their shorefront docks, rafts, etc. and this exposes yards and yards of the wonderful muddy pond bottom.

Did you see the deer tracks in that first photo? Since it rained the day before I came here I knew that these tracks were very fresh. A deer was most likely getting a drink earlier that morning.

A raccoon had also paid the pond a visit, most likely looking for snails and mussels.

Empty walnut size snail shells were everywhere. I never knew there were so many in this pond. I’ve read that there are invasive Chinese snails (Bellamya chinensis) in our lakes and ponds but they’re the size of a hen’s egg, so I doubt this was one of those. Another invasive snail found here is the Japanese trapdoor snail (Viviparus malleattus) which gets its name from the trapdoor it can close when danger appears. The snail pictured is smaller than that one too, I think, so I’m not sure what their name is.

Ice had formed in a footprint. Once the sun’s rays fell on it, it didn’t last long.

Alder (Alnus incana) tongue gall is caused by a fungus (Taphrina alni) rather than an insect like many galls. The fungus chemically deforms parts of the ovarian tissue of the female cone-like catkins (strobiles) and causes long, tongue shaped galls known as languets to grow from them. These galls seem to like high humidity so are usually found on alders that grow near swamps, ponds and streams.  These galls have a bright red phase in spring but I never remember to look for them at that time of year. They blacken over time so the ones pictured are older.

Birches have their catkins all ready for spring. Surely it must be right around the corner.

This pond is a popular spot for Canada geese and their feathers hung from the branches of the bushes.

I put a tiny mussel shell on a nickel to see how small it really was. Since the diameter of a nickel is 3/4 of an inch, the mussel was the smallest I’ve seen. It looked like a tiny shiny butterfly.

Colorful turkey tail fungi (Trametes versicolor) brightened up a stump at the water’s edge. I’m seeing more blue / purple ones this year than I ever have, and I have no idea why after nearly two years of seeing just a very few brown ones.

There was more color on this piece of driftwood; a nickel size orange spot. You can find colors like this at any time of year if you’re willing to slow down and look just a little closer. I don’t know if this one was algae, rust, or something else. It had virtually no thickness.

The pond has been drained so low that the water’s edge where it is now would normally be at chest level or higher on an adult, so the rock in this photo wouldn’t be so easily seen. But this is a beach where people swim, and the rock is in a perfect position for swimmers to stub their toes on it. I wonder why someone doesn’t move it now that it’s so easy to get to. No doubt boys vie for a chance to stand on top of it when they swim.

I was dumbfounded when I saw this statue of the Hindu deity Ganesh lying on the shore because this is the second statue of him I’ve found this year. The first was in September on the banks of the Ashuelot River and this statue looks exactly like that one except that it has a lot more wear. The Ashuelot River doesn’t flow into Wilson Pond so unless someone brought the statue that I saw on the river bank here, this is a different statue. Why would two different people throw statues into a river and a pond? I wonder what significance water has in the worship of Ganesh? He is said to be the lord of success and the remover of obstacles on one’s spiritual path. He is also thought to bring education, knowledge, wisdom and prosperity. And he seems to be trying to tell me something. I wish I knew what it was.

Maybe Ganesh is trying to tell me that I’m already prosperous. After all I have the riches of this New Hampshire landscape laid out before me like a never ending feast for the eyes and soul, and occasionally I’m transported back in time to enjoy being a boy of 10 again. I don’t see how anyone could possibly be wealthier.

Just imagine becoming the way you used to be as a very young child, before you understood the meaning of any word, before opinions took over your mind. The real you is loving, joyful, and free. The real you is just like a flower, just like the wind, just like the ocean, just like the sun. ~Miguel Angel Ruiz

Thanks for stopping in.

 

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Time for a Climb

Last Sunday morning there was ice on the puddles and I thought that it must have been cold enough over the last few nights to make snow at the ski areas so off I went to the High Blue trail in Walpole, which is north of Keene and higher in elevation. From there you can see the ski trails on Stratton Mountain in Vermont. The trek starts by following an old logging road to the trail head.

With a sign like this one to guide you, you can’t miss it.

Soon you come to the meadow, which is cut each summer for hay. As I was taking this photo I saw something small and dark moving out there, and it was heading straight for me. I’ve been here enough times to know that there shouldn’t be anything moving in this meadow, but if there was it would most likely be a deer.

It certainly wasn’t a deer; it was a porcupine and it seemed to be eating its way through the meadow. It would walk a few feet and then stop and munch some clover or whatever it was finding. What was odd about this encounter is that porcupines are supposedly mostly nocturnal creatures and spend much of their time in trees.

He came right over to me and sat up on his haunches for a better look. I asked him to please hold still for a photo or two and smile if he liked, and he was very obliging. He was also quite cute and looked like he had just had his hair done. If he was a pet I think I’d call him Yoda. Now I know why Leslie asked me if I ever posted porcupine photos a few posts ago. She said they were one of her favorites, so this one is for you Leslie. It’s easy to love such a gentle, friendly animal isn’t it? I’ve heard that they will play with toys like a ball of string for hours, just like a cat would.

For those who don’t know porcupines, they’re a rodent that can weigh up to 35 pounds, and large ones can be almost 4 feet long, including their tail. They are herbivores with large front teeth that they use to eat wood, bark and stems. They also eat fruit, clover, leaves, and fresh young springtime growth.

After giving me the once over he seemed to remember that he was on a mission and gazed out over the meadow with his beautiful, sparkling eyes. I realized that I was between him and an old apple tree and I wondered if that was where he was going. If so I didn’t want to stand in his way, even though he looked well fed.

As he slowly moved on I got a good look at the quills on and near his tail. Though their hair is soft porcupines carry sharp, barbed quills that can anchor themselves in flesh, so you don’t want to cuddle them. Many a dog has had to have quills removed from their noses in a painful procedure that often involves pliers. When attacked a porcupine curls into a bristly ball to protect its vulnerable stomach and then there is no way in except through the quills. The porcupine’s Latin name Erethizon dorsatum means “quill pig.”

Later when I was leaving I stopped at the old apple tree and saw a single, half eaten apple on it. These branches were too small to support the weight of a porcupine though, so I’m guessing that birds are eating it. Maybe the rest of the fruit had fallen and was easier for the porcupine to get to. Or maybe he wasn’t interested in apples at all; I didn’t see him on the way back.

I keep hoping to see a deer here but I never have. All I see are the game trails they follow and twigs they’ve browsed on.

Hunters know they’re here too, as this reflector tacked to a tree shows. I first saw these last year but didn’t know what they were until several helpful readers said they were used by hunters when it’s dark enough to have to use a flashlight to find their way. I was glad I was wearing a bright orange hat and hunting vest. This isn’t the time of year to be wearing my deer colored coat.

After the meadow there is more old road to walk for a shot while.

Then the road narrows to trail, which was covered with dry, crackly beech and oak leaves. The noisy leaves would make sneaking up on a deer just about impossible I would think. Better to sit and wait for them to happen by.

But it was a little cool to be sitting around waiting for deer, as the ice on the far side of the small hilltop pond shows. I was very surprised to see no duckweed on it; when I was here in September it was almost completely covered with it, so where could it all have gone so fast? It’s usually almost impossible to get rid of once it’s on a pond so its disappearance is a mystery to me. Maybe the wood ducks ate it all.

Being a once upon a time dry stone wall builder myself I always have to stop and admire the old walls that run through these woods. There are many miles of them, crisscrossing in a way that once made perfect sense when this land was pasture, but which now seems quite random.

Living up here might not have been easy but the outcrops break naturally into large flat slabs an inch or two thick, and that meant that wall building was probably easier than it would have been otherwise. The stones that come from ledge like this are every wall builders dream. I was able to build a wall with it once and it went up faster than any other wall I’ve ever built.

Yellow-fuzz cone slime mold (Hemitrichia clavata) grew on a fallen birch log. In this photo you can see the fruiting bodies that open into tiny cups filled with yellow fuzzy threads that make the mass look and feel a lot like felt. I first saw this slime mold at about this time last year at Porcupine Falls in Gilsum, so it has taken me just about a year to identify it. The cups are small enough to give me trouble seeing them without a lens, so I have to quite literally shoot blind and hope for the best.

The view from the top was hazy as it often is. Stratton Mountain, off across the Connecticut River valley in Vermont, looked like a blueish blur and its peak was cloud covered.

Zooming in didn’t help much but I can see a white line or two and that means snow on the ski trails. If they’re making snow up there in the mountains it won’t be long before it falls naturally down here. Maybe I came here subconsciously hoping that seeing snow would prepare me for winter and maybe it has, but nothing could prepare me for all of the other surprising things that I saw. That’s one of the things I love about being out in nature; there’s always a surprise waiting just around the next bend.

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. ~ Emily Dickinson

Thanks for coming by.

 

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Indian Summer

In a nutshell, Indian summer is a warm spell that follows cold weather. Since we saw several below freezing nights in October and then temperatures in the 70s F for the first week of November, I’d say that we saw Indian summer. Some of the flowers thought so too, like the aster pictured above.

This explanation of where the term Indian Summer originated is from the Old Farmer’s Almanac: “Early settlers would welcome the arrival of cold wintry weather in late October when they could leave their stockades unarmed. But then came a time when it would suddenly turn warm again, and the Native Americans would decide to have one more go at the settlers. “Indian summer,” the settlers called it.”

A very strange thing happened on Friday, November 6th; as if someone flipped a switch somewhere, almost all the leaves fell from the oak trees, all at once and in one day, as if it were a leaf avalanche or a leaf waterfall. People wrote me from Vermont saying the same thing happened there and I’ve heard several people, including old timers, say that they’ve never seen anything like it. If you know oak trees at all you’re probably as baffled by this behavior as the rest of us because here in New England many oak trees don’t lose their leaves until winter is well under way, and some hang on until spring. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen nature do and I don’t have any idea what might have caused it. Did the same thing happen in your area too, I wonder?

Goldenrod (Solidago) still blooms be sparsely, here and there.

This could very well be the last red clover blossom (Trifolium pretense) that I see until spring.

This forsythia thought that spring had already arrived.  I wonder what it will do when spring really does come. It would be too bad if the cheery yellow blossoms didn’t shout that spring had arrived, but I’m grateful for the taste of spring that this plant gave me in November.

A lady bug landed on my pant leg and stayed for a while before flying off. She didn’t say what she was looking for but I was surprised to see here so late in the year.

A slug was either sleeping or browsing on a moss, fungi, and lichen covered log. I just realized that I have no idea what slugs do in the winter.

There are still plenty of fungi appearing. These examples were blushing a blueish lavender color. I don’t know if they were blueish lavender aging to gray or if it was the other way around, so I haven’t been able to identify them.

A wild turkey lost a feather in the woods recently. You can see an acorn or two poking out of the forest litter and it makes sense that the feather would be among them because turkeys love acorns. This is one bird that flies with a lot of historical baggage; Native Americans first domesticated wild turkeys around 800 B.C. and raised them for their feathers.  It wasn’t until 1100 A.D., almost 2000 years later, that they started eating them. It is thought that only the Aztec turkey breed survived into the present day. The turkeys we eat today could very well be descendants of those same turkeys that the Aztecs raised, and wouldn’t that be amazing? A history nut could almost overload on information like that.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, with a 4 foot wingspan red tailed hawks are one of the largest and also one of the most common birds that we see here. This one had caught something but I couldn’t see what it was. All I had with me was my small Panasonic Lumix camera that I use for macro photos and this bird was really too far away for a good photo, but I tried anyway. It came out very soft but at least you can see the beautiful hawk, which is something you don’t see very often on this blog.

I don’t know if it was a hawk, bobcat, or another predator, but something took the squirrel and left the tail.  New Hampshire’s gray squirrel population is thriving this year because an abundance of food in the forests and predators are very happy about that.

I know a place where hundreds of burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) grow and I visit there in the fall because seeing them all turn a soft shade of pastel pink at once is a beautiful sight. This year for some reason they decided on yellow-orange instead of pink but still, even with the unexpected color they were enough to make me stop and just admire them for a few moments. Even though they’re terribly invasive it’s hard to hate a shrub that delights the eye as much as this one does.

I wonder sometimes if every leaf changes color at least a little in the fall. These yellow ones are young examples of Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota.)

Isn’t it interesting how the path to the coldest season is strewn with the warmest colors?

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?  ~John Steinbeck

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Fall Fungi

After a cold October the first week of November has seen temperatures near 70 degrees each day and this has encouraged the crop of fall mushrooms. The oyster mushrooms in the above photo grew on the underside of a fallen tree. Though they often appear to have no stem oyster mushrooms have off center stems that usually grow out of the side of the log and are hidden by the cap.

Mushrooms are often eaten by tiny worms called nematodes that live on plant and fungal tissue, but not oyster mushrooms. Scientists discovered in 1986 that oyster mushrooms “exude extracellular toxins that stun {nematode] worms, whereupon the mycelium invades its body through its orifices.” What this means is that oyster mushrooms are carnivorous. They also consume bacteria (Pseudomonas and Agrobacterium) in order to get nitrogen and protein.

One of the things that attracts me to mushrooms is the wide variety of beautiful colors and shapes they come in. I think these pink and red ones that I saw growing out of the side of a log might be clustered collybia (Gymnopus acervatus,) but I’m not certain of that. My mushroom books say that clustered collybia is a common fall mushroom but I’m not sure that I’ve seen it.

Mushroom spores are carried by the wind so it is unusual to see them dropping to the forest floor like they have in the above photo. I’ve only seen this happen twice and each time it was on a still, humid day.

Jelly fungi like the witch’s butter (Tremella mesenterica) in the above photo seem to start appearing when it gets colder in the fall and many can be found right through winter, even though they sometimes freeze solid. I almost always find them on stumps and logs; often on oak. After a rain is the best time to find them.

If you roll logs over like I do you’ll see some astoundingly colorful examples of crust fungi, like the blue example in this photo. I find this one a lot on oak logs, especially. Though I’ve tried for a year now I haven’t been able to identify it, so if you know what its name is I’d love to hear from you.

Velvet shank mushrooms (Flammulina velutipes) are a common sight in winter because they fruit very late in the season and sometimes even during a warm spell in winter. I’ve seen them a few times when there was snow on the ground and it’s always a surprise. The orange caps of these mushrooms often shade to brown in the center. The stem is covered in fine downy hairs and that’s where this mushroom’s common name comes from.

These older examples of velvet shank mushrooms on the same tree looked as if they had been dusted with confectioner’s sugar but it turned out to be mold. Nothing is wasted in nature; everything gets eaten in one way or another.

Puffballs and little brown mushrooms vie for space on a log. The mushrooms reminded me of vanilla wafer cookies.

Milk white toothed polypore (Irpex lacteus) is a crust fungus common on fallen branches and rotting logs. The teeth start life as tubes or pores in the spore bearing surface, which breaks apart with age to become tooth like as the above photo shows. As they age these “teeth” will turn brown and that’s how I usually see them. This example was very fresh.

Lemon drops (Bisporella citrina) look like tiny beads of sunshine that have been sprinkled over logs, but they are really sac fungi with stalked fruit bodies. The term “sac fungi” comes from microscopic sexual structures which resemble wineskins. There are over 64,000 different sac fungi, including cup and “ear” fungi, jelly babies, and morel mushrooms. Lemon drops start life as a tiny yellow disc and look as if they lie flat on the log, but each disc hovers just above the surface on a short stalk. As they age each disc will become cup shaped. The “citrina” part of the scientific name comes from the Latin citrin, and means “lemon yellow.” The smaller ones in the above photo are barely as large as a period made by a pencil on paper.

At first I thought this was some kind of strange crust fungus but as I looked closer I realized that it had to be a slime mold, which I don’t usually find this late in the year. After some digging I found that it is called the yellow-fuzz cone slime mold (Hemitrichia clavata.) The fruiting bodies of this slime mold open into goblet shaped cups filled with yellowish fuzzy threads which makes the mass look like felt fabric. Though it appears very orange to me my color finding software tells me that it is indeed yellow. Other examples I’ve seen in the past have been bright, lemon yellow.

I don’t know the name of this tiny mushroom I saw growing on a twig but its shape reminded me of the beautiful dome on the Taj Mahal in India. Wouldn’t it be something if the idea for that type of architecture originally came from a mushroom? I’m convinced that the idea for the beautiful and ancient Chinese blue and white porcelain came from silky dogwood berries (Cornus amomum,) pleasingly dressed in the same blue and white for a short time in summer.

Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. When mushroom spores grow they produce mycelium, which eventually produces fruit, which is the aboveground part that we see. The mycelium in the above photo grew on the underside of an oak log that was in contact with the soil. Most of the mycelium that I see are white but they are occasionally yellow like those pictured.

I think that the crust fungus in the above photo might be an example of an orange crust fungus (Stereum complicatum.) This small fungus has a smooth whitish underside with no pores. The complicatum part of the scientific name means “folded back on itself” and the above photo shows this example just starting that folding. It likes to grow on the logs of deciduous trees.

Wrinkled crust fungi (Phlebia radiata) lies flat on the wood that it grows on, much like a crustose lichen would, and radiate out from a central point. They have no stem, gills or pores and they don’t seem to mind cool weather; the two I’ve seen have been growing at this time of year. I think they’re a very beautiful mushroom and I’d like to see more of them.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. ~Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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Lichens

When the flowers fade and the leaves have all fallen many think that there’s nothing with any color left to see, but that isn’t true. There’s still a lot of color out there even in winter, but it comes in smaller packages and you have to look a little closer to find it. Some of the best colors can be found on lichens like the beautiful poplar sunburst lichen (Xanthomendoza hasseana) in the above photo. This lichen is found on tree bark and is almost always fruiting, which the sucker like, disc shaped fruiting bodies (apothecia) show.

Chances are good that if you go looking for lichens you’ll see many gray crustose lichens that don’t appear to be very exciting at first glance…

…but when you give them a closer look you’ll find that even lichens that seem drab and boring will often have some color and might be very interesting. I think the one with the tan fruiting bodies in the above photo might be the crab’s eye lichen (Ochrolechia tartarea.) One of the best identifying characteristics of this lichen is the notched rims around its apothecia. I’ve never seen another lichen with them.

Lichens like the common goldspeck lichen (Candelariella vitellina) in the above photo are here year round for us to enjoy, and once the leaves fall many lichens become even easier to see. Look for this crustose lichen on stone. Crustose lichens form crusts that tightly adhere to the substrate that they grow on and usually can’t be removed without damaging it.

Pink earth lichen (Dibaeis baeomyces) looks a lot like bubble gum lichen (Icmadophila ericetorum.) One of the differences between the two is the length of the stalks that the pink apothecia sit on. They are longer on pink earth lichen than they are on bubble gum lichen. Other than that they look much the same.

Pink earth lichen is an interesting crustose lichen that I find growing in large patches on acid, sandy soil in full sun along with blueberries and sweet fern.  It is uncommon and I know of only one or two places where it grows.

This beautiful little scattered rock posy lichen (Rhizoplaca subdiscrepans) taught me how fast lichens can grow. A few years ago it could have sat on a penny with room to spare, but now it is more than quarter size. The orange pad like parts are its fruiting bodies (apothecia) and the grayish, brain like part is the body (thallus) of this foliose lichen.

Crustose rock disk lichens (Lecidella stigmatea) look a lot like tile lichens (Lecidea tessellate,) but tile lichens have black fruiting bodies that are sunken, or concave, and rock disk lichens have black fruiting bodies that are raised or flat. These lichens are very common on rocks of all kinds and grow in full sun.

This photo shows how the black apothecia stand slightly proud of the body (Thallus) of the lichen. This is an important identifying characteristic when looking at gray lichens with black apothecia, so you need to get in close with a good loupe or macro lens.

Noting whether or not the lichen’s fruiting bodies (apothecia) have rims is important when trying to identify lichens. I think this gray crustose lichen with rimmed black apothecia might be a crater lichen (Diploschistes scruposus.) It grew on stone. A similar lichen is the cowpie lichen (Diploschistes muscorum,) but it grows on soil.

One of the things I like about lichens is how they grow virtually everywhere, so you don’t have to search for them. This post and rail fence had them all over it.

This lichen garden was on the top of one of the posts. It had common powder horn lichens and red British soldiers growing in it.

This is a closer look at a British soldier lichen (Cladonia cristatella). It’s about the size of a wooden matchstick. I wish I had seen the white lichen with black apothecia to the left but I didn’t see it until I looked at this photo. British soldier lichen gets its common name from the British redcoats who fought in the revolutionary war.

There were many examples of beard lichens on the fence. This one is a fishbone beard lichen (Usnea filipendula,) named for the way its branches resemble the backbone of a fish.

I’ve tried for several years to identify this green beard lichen but I still don’t know its name. I’m fairly sure that it’s in the Usnea family of lichens but I’m not sure which one. It grew on the fence right alongside other gray Usnea lichens.

There is a low mist in the woods—it is a good day to study lichens. ~Henry David Thoreau

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Willard Pond

Last Saturday morning I was ready to go to 108 acre Willard Pond in Antrim, NH but frost coated my windshield. While the defroster did its work I took a photo of a cluster of frosty but colorful oak leaves on my lawn.

Before I turned on the defroster I also had to get a few photos of the frost on my windshield.

Finally I was on the road to Willard Pond, and what a colorful road it was.  I lived in Antrim years ago but I was too busy with running a gardening business then to enjoy the great riches that surrounded me. A recent post on the Park Explorer Blog reminded me of this place and coming here was almost like going home again. If you’d like to learn more about New Hampshire, especially about its parks and an occasional old forgotten cellar hole, you’d be doing yourself a favor by reading The Park Explorer.

Willard Pond is a wildlife sanctuary under the protection of the Audubon Society and it is unusual because of the loons that nest here. There are also bears, moose and deer living here, as well as many bird species, including bald eagles.

I didn’t see any loons but the rugged, unspoiled beauty that I did see was enough for me. The flaming hillside of beeches and oaks was just amazing.

In this place the hills come right down to the water so there is little flat, level ground to be found but there is a blazed, one person wide trail that I followed. I was glad I wore my hiking boots; this isn’t the place for sneakers.

Boardwalks helped navigate streams.

Huge boulders have broken away from the hillside and tumbled down, almost to the water in some places. Some were easily as big as delivery vans.

Witch hazels blossomed in great profusion all along the trail. I love seeing their ribbon like petals so late in the year and smelling their fresh, clean scent.

Benches are placed here and there for those who’d rather not sit on a boulder or tree stump.

This is one of the views you can see from the bench in the previous photo. The morning sun was just kissing the tops of the trees. Many were already bare.

If you turn 180 degrees you can also see this view from the bench. It’s hard to decide which is more beautiful, but being under these old oaks and beeches certainly made my spirits soar. Thornton Wilder once said “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. “ I was conscious on this day, and felt extremely alive.

I always peek into hollow trees and I was glad I did this time because there was an unexpected surprise waiting.

Little brown mushrooms grew in the leaf litter that had gathered in the hollow of the tree. I take a tip from the mycologists and skip trying to identify little brown mushrooms because there are just too many of them that look alike. They lump them all together and call them LBMs, xo I will too.

There are many streams and rivulets running down the hillsides into the pond and mosses grow all along them. I saw many examples of the beautiful little bordered thyme moss (Mnium marginatum.) A translucent, sometimes reddish border encircles the tapering leaves, which have tiny teeth along their upper margins. Each small rosette of leaves seen here could have easily hidden behind a pea. I love how this moss seems to glow with its own inner light and though I passed it by several times it kept pulling at me, as if wanting to be admired. Finally it was, and very much so. It’s a beautiful little thing.

I’m fairly sure that this burnt looking area on a yellow birch was a chaga fungus (Inonotus obliquus.) It’s certainly not a burl and chaga is the only other thing I can think of that looks like burnt charcoal and grows on birch.  This fungus has been used medicinally in Russia, China, Korea and Japan for centuries, and it is said to be packed with vitamins and minerals. Recently it has shown promise in cancer research, reducing the size of tumors. In Siberia it is said to be the secret to long life.

I think that these marks on the cut end of this log were caused by bluestain, which is also called sapstain because of the way it stains the sapwood of logs. If this log were sawn into planks unsightly stains could show on the surface of one or more of them, and this lowers the price of the log. Both deep and surface bluestain can be caused by fungi called Ophiostoma minus and others, which all seem to be collectively called bluestain fungi and which can eventually kill the tree. It is thought that bark beetles and mites help it spread.

I couldn’t stop taking photos of the amazing trees. They were so beautiful and several times they enticed me off the trail for a better view so I could try to show you what being here was really like. Finally I realized that I had lost all sense of time and had no idea what time of day it was. Nothing that I’ve experienced can compare with total immersion in nature but it was Halloween and I had candy to hand out to the little ghosts and hobgoblins that would soon come knocking, so I had to climb back into myself and leave this wonderful place.

I don’t usually feel a need to name photos but when I saw this one I knew it had to be called serenity because more than anything else, that’s what I found here. I hope you’ll find it too.

Go in the direction of where your peace is coming from. ~C. Joybell C.

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