Things I’ve Seen

The full moon was setting over Half Moon Pond in Hancock early one morning so I took a photo of it with my cell phone. The muted pastel colors were beautiful I thought, but the cell phone’s camera overexposed the moon. Its gray cratered surface was much more visible than is seen here.  A lone ice fisherman’s hut stood on the ice, even though thin ice warnings have been repeated time and again this winter.

This is the time of year that I start wondering about bud growth and what the trees are doing. I saw some red elderberry buds (Sambucus racemosa) recently that were quite a beautiful sight on a winter day. Though they didn’t have as much purple on the scales as I’ve seen in the past they reminded me of spring.

One reason I’m interested in what buds are doing so early is due to my seeing a photo captioned “The Weird Season” in the local newspaper. It showed two tree tappers tapping trees in a sugar bush, and they said that the sap is running because December was so warm. Though the photo was recent last week we didn’t see 32 degrees or above for a single day, so I doubt the sap ran for long. I suppose though when you have 6000 trees to tap you’re anxious to get started. The above photo shows how tapping is done these days; with a plastic tube running from tree to tree and then to a collection tank or the sugar shack. A vacuum pump helps gravity make sure the sap flows as it should. It’s quicker and easier for the syrup makers and is also more sanitary but I prefer seeing the old steel buckets hanging on the trees.

There are insects that can make a perfectly round hole in a tree but the above photo shows a tap hole in a maple, drilled last year. It’s about a half inch in diameter and the tree is most likely working to heal it.

The hips of the Alberta wild rose (Rosa acicularis) and the soft downy-rose (Rosa mollis) are the only ones I’ve heard of that have prickles. I’ve never seen them on rugosa rose hips. I’m not sure which these are but the birds haven’t touched a single one of them.

I took a walk along Beaver Brook in Keene to see if there were any ice formations. There were and they had grown quickly.  From the water to the top of the ice was about 3 feet, I’d guess, so this would not be a good hole to fall into.

It’s amazing to think that a river or stream can stop itself with ice. Beaver Brook wasn’t dammed up but I could see how it might easily happen. Last year the brook had so much ice on it that hardly a trickle of water could be heard in places where it is usually quite noticeable. It was if it had frozen solid, right down to its gravel bed.

For the third time this winter I’ve found very long, sharply pointed ice crystals. Temperature and humidity are said to determine the forms that crystals take but I don’t know why the temperature and humidity this winter would be telling the ice to grow so long and pointed. Humidity seems low but the temperature is 4 degrees above average for the month. This makes 3 months in a row with temperatures above average, and maybe it’s having an effect on the ice. Lake, pond and river ice all seem normal.

While I was at the brook I saw a yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis) with a healed frost crack. Frost cracks happen when the sun warms the tree during the day and the temperature drops quickly at night. If you’re in or near the woods at night in winter you can often hear the trees splitting and cracking, and sometimes it’s as loud as a rifle shot. Frost cracks can heal in the summer when the tree produces a new layer of inner bark to heal the wound but then can crack again in winter. When this repeated healing and cracking happens over the course of a few years the buildup of new tissue can create a frost rib like that seen in the photo.

When it gets cold dark purple, almost black spots appear on the bark of some trees. They are really there all the time but are kind of a reddish color and not quite so noticeable at other times of year when there are so many other things to see. Those who think they’ve never seen a liverwort might want to stop and take a closer look at these dark blotches because they are Frullania liverworts, one of the few liverworts that can thrive in dry places.

There are about 800 species of Frullania liverworts and many grow as epiphytes on the bark of trees and shrubs where the humidity is high. Epiphytic plants take nothing from the host plants they grow on, so this liverwort does no harm to trees. It can look very lacy and fern like at times. Sometimes it reminds me of the beautiful fan corals found on distant coral reefs, as the above example does.

The very small leaves of the Frullania liverwort were strung together like beads. Some Frullania liverworts are said to be very fragrant so I’ll have to smell some and see.

This crabapple tree was encrusted with fringed candle flame lichen (Candelaria fibrosa.) This lichen seems to be trying to tell me that certain lichens prefer certain trees. So far I’ve seen it only on crabapple trees.

Fringed candle flame lichen is extremely small and looks like a tiny pile of scrambled eggs as you get closer. From a distance it can look like a yellow powder on the tree’s bark.

It seems that script lichen is another lichen that produces spores in winter; at least that’s when I see their squiggly spore bearing bodies (Apothecia) appear.

A close look shows that the apothecia sit on the grayish body (Thallus) of this lichen, making them look as if they were beautifully painted on rather than etched into the surface. I think this example is the common script lichen (Graphis scripta.) There is another script lichen called the asterisk lichen (Arthonia radiata) that I’ve always wanted to see. It has apothecia that look just like asterisks.

Someone found a water lily leaf in the river and put it on a stone as if it were a beautiful sculpture on a plinth. I loved it for its veins and its rich red-brown color and its missing pieces, and I left it not knowing or caring how long I’d sat beside it. Where does the time go?

Go to the winter woods: listen there; look, watch, and ‘the dead months’ will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest. ~ Fiona Macleod

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Time for a Climb

Last Sunday, the day after the big mid-Atlantic blizzard had blown out to sea we had a beautiful sunny day, so I decided to climb the High Blue Trail in Walpole. I chose it because I hadn’t climbed since we had ice fall on top of the snow and I wasn’t sure how icy the trails would be. High Blue Trail is a very gentle climb and though the snow was very loud and crunchy it wasn’t at all slippery. Many had gone before me.

After four cloudy weekends in a row the sky seemed an incredibly beautiful shade of blue.

The sky wasn’t entirely cloudless though. I saw these 3 trying to sneak past out of the corner of my eye.

The sun was very bright and I was glad that I had brought sunglasses. Snow blindness is a very real thing and isn’t pleasant. It happened to me once when I was shoveling snow in bright sunshine and it wasn’t until the next day that my blurry vision finally got back to normal. It is basically sunburn on your eye and some say it is quite painful. I didn’t have any real pain but it certainly is annoying when you keep blinking and your vision doesn’t clear.

The blue shadows, green mosses and white blankets of snow softened the stone ledges. Some say winter is hard and sharp and it can be, but it isn’t always that way.

The wind made these two maples rub together and they rubbed enough to rub away their outer bark and become grafted together. Unless man interferes they will now stay that way for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately some fungus spores found the wound and grew, so there is a good chance that the lives of these trees will be cut short.

I’ve seen this little two foot tall spruce that grows beside the trail completely covered with snow a few times. I was very glad that it wasn’t this time. It’s nice to measure snowfalls in inches rather than feet for a change.

Some small creature scampered around this sapling and then went back from where it had started.  Either that or a chipmunk had gotten new skis for Christmas and was trying them out on a downhill run.

There was a lot of coming and going around this hollow tree.

But in spite of all the footprints nobody was home.  I suppose you couldn’t blame them for being out on such a beautiful day.

The clubmosses have released their spores. The orange yellow, club-like strobilus that bears the spores is smooth and closed before they are released, and open and bushy afterwards. These spores have been collected and dried for many years to make flash powder. They are high in fat content and when mixed with air become highly flammable. They’ve been used in fireworks and explosives for years, and also as camera flashes before flash bulbs were invented. These days they are still used in magic acts. If you ever see a big impressive flash of fire on a stage, thank a clubmoss.

As always I had to stop at the old stone foundation. Winters must have seemed very long and cold for those who once lived here and I always wonder how they managed.

I’ve been up here too many times to count but I’ve never seen the nail in this tree before. I wonder how long it’s been here.

The nail is on the backside of the tree that the sign is on, which makes it even more surprising that I’ve never seen it.

The stacked rocks are still here from last summer. I call them spoilers because for me they are needless distractions that spoil the experience.

As expected the view across the Connecticut River Valley to Vermont was very blue but strangely, the sky wasn’t. At least it wasn’t the deep sapphire blue that it had been in other spots along the trail.

I would imagine that they must be making snow every night on Stratton Mountain if the ski trails are any indication. The past week saw some cold nights and the temperature had only risen to 17 degrees when I left Keene to come here. A stiff and steady westerly breeze meant that it was fairly cool standing in this spot, so I didn’t stay long. Climbing really isn’t about the views for me anyway; it’s more about what I see along the way. Because there are so many interesting things to see along the way hazy or cloud blocked views never disappoint.

The old school of thought would have you believe that you’d be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn’t what being in nature is all about. Rather, it’s about feeling free, unbounded, shedding the distractions and barriers of our civilization—not bringing them with us. ~Ryel Kestenbaum

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Into the Icebox

Each winter seeping groundwater creates columns of ice that grow to unbelievable proportions in a deep cut railroad bed that lies slightly north of Keene. Ice climbers call this place “the icebox” and come here from all over New England to train. The New Hampshire branch of the Appalachian Mountain Club also holds ice climbing clinics here. I don’t climb; I just come to see beauty of a kind that I can’t see anywhere else.

Some of the ice is blue. This example looked very solid and climbable.

Some ice is green. This example was on its way to being big enough to climb but I don’t know if the ice climbers will climb green ice. I’ve only seen them climb blue ice, which is very dense.

This ice formed a kind of shallow cave or grotto that I could have stepped into if I wasn’t so wary of falling ice and stone. It happens fairly regularly here and you don’t want to get hit by it.

Most of the groundwater seeps through cracks in the stone but in places it runs in small streams and this is one of those places. One of the constants here is the sound of trickling water, winter and summer alike. The ice in this photo was formed by splashing water and was crystal clear. This place has taught me that there are differences in the clarity of ice, depending on how it has formed.

The drainage ditches that the railroad engineers built 150 years ago at the base of the ledges still work as they were designed to and carry the water away down the gentle grade, keeping the rail bed high and dry. As the snow gets higher these ditches get deeper. I often put on knee high rubber boots and walk in them to explore the rock faces, but I didn’t do so on this trip. It was the ice I came to see.

The water in the drainage ditches never freezes completely and its movement cuts off the ice on the ledges at water level. This means that the ice that looks like it’s hanging from the ledges really does hang and isn’t supported by the ground at all in many places. When it comes free from the walls and falls sometimes it’s as if a crystal tree fell across the trail. I wonder what the railroad did when such large pieces of ice fell on the tracks when the trains were running.

Last year the ice in this spot was bright orange but this year it leaned more toward orangey brown.

Mineral stains on the rock faces tell part of the story of the colored ice but there are many reasons that ice can be colored. Even a higher density can turn it blue.

There are other colors on these rock walls but they aren’t in ice. This orange patch is caused by green algae called Trentepohlia aurea. Though it is called green algae a carotenoid pigment in the alga cells called hematochrome or beta- carotene, which is the same pigment that gives carrots their orange color, hides the green chlorophyll. I’m not sure if the algae color any ice here.

Large areas of stone are covered in places by liverworts but they don’t seem to mind being encased in ice for the winter. In the spring you wouldn’t know they had seen any ice at all.

Many mosses turn a yellower shade of green in winter but otherwise ride it out with little change.

This fern was completely encased in ice. Since it is an evergreen fern it will most likely lose its leaves in spring when new growth begins.

I think there must be soil washed along in the groundwater for ice to look dirty like this example does.

I was hoping this shot would convey a sense of how tall this ice is but it really doesn’t.  These ice columns are too small in diameter to climb but the ice climbers go for the taller ice I’ve noticed, and these were plenty tall.

Much of the ice was half what it was last year but we still have February to get through. One of the things that made last February so memorable was the extreme below zero cold that went on and on for most of the month. If that happens this year this ice will become huge like it was then.

This past week has been the coldest we’ve seen this winter so I’m sure the ice has grown some. I’ll have to visit it again before it all starts to melt away in March. When I leave here and write a post about the place I often marvel at having virtually no memory of how cold it was, so captivating were the colors, sounds, and shapes. When great joy passes through you inconvenience slips away. You remember the joy but not the inconvenience.

One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before. ~Anne Rice

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Winter (ish)

Winter can’t seem to make up its mind this year. We’ll get one or two cold days and then two or three warm ones and the snowstorms have left little more than powdered sugar dustings. After the record breaking warmth of December, January is now 6 degrees above average and after last winter I’m not complaining about any of it. The photo above was taken right after a small ice storm as the sun was melting all the ice off the trees and shrubs.

This is what happens when it isn’t light enough for the camera to see. I took this with my cell phone at Half Moon Pond in Hancock at dawn one morning. I was going to delete it but then it started to remind me of a watercolor painting so I kept it. It shows how misty some of our mornings have been lately.

This also shows how misty it has been but this was taken at sunset after a dusting of snow fell that morning.

Our smaller ponds have started to freeze up but the ice is thin and ice fishermen are getting frustrated.

The river has hardly frozen at all but one day it was full of these curious white pancakes.

The pancakes turned out to be river foam that had collected into discs and then had frozen overnight.

There was a tiny bit of ice on the Ashuelot River and some mallards swam by it just as I was preparing to take its photo. Two males and a female, with the female leading the way.

This is what happens when a pond freezes and then it rains and the rain freezes; glare ice. If it hadn’t been so thin it would have been an ice skater’s dream come true. Thin ice causes problems every year and this year is no different. I’ve already heard of two boys and a snowmobiler having to be rescued, and a deer was rescued one night as well. They’re all lucky to be alive.

I wonder how the deer get through a winter like this. They can’t stand on the ice very well and sometimes all 4 feet splay out from under them. In some places the woods are full of ice as the above photo shows, so I think the deer are might be having a rough time of it.

I saw a huge old maple tree that was hollowed out enough for me to have comfortably had a sit down in it if I had been so inclined. There are more hollow trees living in the forest than one would guess.

Can you see the setting sun in this old pine tree? I took its photo because the setting sun lit up the lichens covering almost every bit of exposed branch. The branches themselves have grown into a witches’ broom, which I rarely see on trees, especially conifers. According to the Arnold Arboretum the English term witches’-broom translates directly from the German word Hexenbesen. Both parts of the German compound word are found in English as hex, meaning to bewitch, and besom, a bundle of twigs, meaning witches’ broom is a bewitched bundle of twigs. Even though that might be what it looks like it is actually a deformity caused by any number of things such as disease, fungi, insects or viruses. Many dwarf conifers have been propagated from witches’ brooms and collecting and growing new specimens is big business.

Winter is when jelly fungi appear and one of easiest to find is black jelly fungus (Exidia glandulosa.) This pillow shaped, shiny black fungus is common on alders here. When it dries out it loses about 90%  of its volume and shrinks down to small black flakes, and it looks like someone has smeared paint or tar on the limb that it grows on. This one shows well that jelly fungi are mostly water.

Amber jelly fungus (Exidia recisa) is also common and I find it on oak or poplar limbs. You can’t tell from this photo but it has a shiny side and a matte finish side. The spores are produced on the shiny side and if I understand what I’ve read correctly, this is true of most jelly fungi. This one has the color of jellied cranberry sauce.

This is one of the biggest orange jelly fungi (Dacrymyces palmatus) that I’ve seen. Orange and yellow jelly fungi seem to appear earlier in the season than black or amber jellies do, so I see more of them.  Jelly fungi are fun to see because they add beauty to the winter landscape, but people seem to have a hard time finding them. I think that they probably miss seeing them and many other things because they’re thinking more about where they’re going than where they are, and they walk too fast. To find the small beautiful things in nature I have to walk slowly and focus completely on right here, right now; just the immediate surroundings. If you’re in the woods thinking about what you’ll do when you get home you probably won’t see much, and you’ll remember less.

I’ve seen a lot of puddle ice this year that has grown long, sharp looking ice crystals.

As you’ve seen so far this winter is more about ice than snow, but even that hasn’t approached anything near severe. Winter can’t seem to make up its mind and everyone wonders if it will be as severe as it has been for the last two years. Last year it all happened in February so it’s still a possibility, but I try to think about how each passing day means the sun stays out a little longer and brings us another day closer to March. From that point it’ll be doubtful that we’ll see any severe weather, but anything is possible.

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things. ~Edward Steichen

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Yale Forest in Winter Part Two

Note: This is part two of a two part post. If you’d like to see part one you can scroll down to it.

If you walk long enough on the old abandoned road through Yale forest in Swanzey you’ll come to an open swampy area that was once home to beavers. Beavers will move into a place and eat all the trees and then move on. Their pond will eventually drain and new trees will start to grow, and they will move back again to repeat the cycle. I’ve read that it takes about thirty years to go once around the cycle and this area looks as if it’s in the beaver pond draining stage. Now trees need to grow so the beavers will come back. The above photo shows the old dam which isn’t really holding back any water now, judging by the force of the stream that runs through here.

The height of the embankment in the background of this photo shows that the beavers chose a natural bowl shaped area for their pond, but the grasses in the foreground show that the pond is now mostly dry.

This is another look at the dam. It was long but not real high; maybe 4 feet. I’ve seen them high enough to be taller than I am, holding back an incredible amount of water. The biggest beaver dam on record is one in Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta, Canada that is 2,790 feet long and can be seen in satellite footage from Google Earth. Explorer Rob Mark was the first human to reach it in July of 2014. I hope I’m never near a beaver dam if it lets go.

There was plenty of evidence of beaver activity but it happened a while ago. This beaver stump is beginning to blacken, as were all the others I saw.

Tree cutters of a different kind were also in evidence. I don’t know why they left these logs there. The wood must have been sub-par in some way.

A couple of the logs showed signs of fungus infection. This one had signs of what looked like it might have been blue stain fungus (Ophiostoma,) which is usually transmitted by bark beetles. It is also called sap stain because it discolors the sapwood, along with any boards that are cut from it. This lowers the value of the log considerably; possibly enough so it wasn’t even worth the fuel it would take to truck it to the mill yard.

There was plenty of evidence of bark beetles on pine limbs. Not only do they transmit disease, if they chew one of their channels completely around a branch it will die from being girdled.

Another log had claw marks on it. They puzzled me because the snow was ice covered and too hard for an animal to have left prints. I’m guessing raccoon or maybe a bobcat; they were quite small, but bigger than a housecat would have left.

Clubmosses held their heads up above the snow. This one looked like Lycopodium obscurum, commonly called ground pine, even though it has nothing to do with pines. It is also called rare clubmoss though I don’t know why, because it is everywhere.

The evergreen ferns are showing great fortitude this year. When I see one this way it looks so delicate but the snow and ice surrounding it tell a story of unsuspected toughness. They’re very beautiful against the white snow and add so much to the winter landscape. I’m glad they’re so tough.

Even dead ferns add interest to the winter landscape. I like seeing their deep reddish brown color against the lighter tans of the grasses. It’s a simple thing that brings joy and puts a spring in my step.

Pixie cup lichens (Cladonia asahinae) poked up out of the hair cap moss like tiny golf tees. I was hoping they would be fruiting so I could show you how they reproduce, but not yet. They, like many lichens, produce spores in the winter but it must happen later on. I’m not very good at keeping track of such things.

Striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum) has striped bark but I’ve never seen it come with blue stripes and I can’t find any reference to blue stripes on line. They are usually a cream / white color but will eventually disappear as the tree ages. I took this photo to show how dark the reddish brown bark of striped maple is when compared with other trees, such as the one on the right. This maple often grows in the form of a shrub here and might reach 15 feet tall on a good day. Another name for it is whistle wood because whistles are easily carved from the wood of its branches.

I knew that the buds and young twigs of striped maple were often tomato red but I’ve never seen spots on a bud before. This isn’t a very sharp photo but at least you can see the spots.

It looked like someone had embroidered this brocade moss (Hypnum imponens) on the log it grew on, and that’s how it comes by its common name. It’s a shiny, feathery moss that forms large mats, usually on wood but sometimes on soil. I’m not sure what the small blue bits are. It must have been ice reflecting the blue of the sky. I didn’t see them in person so I’m surprised that the camera did.

I was expecting to see some turkey tail fungi (Trametes versicolor) but this turkey feather was a surprise. There is a story behind it, but it’s one I’ll never know.

I was also hoping to see some crystal clear ice but it had been snowed on and re-froze with a textured surface more like pebbled glass than crystal, but I could still make out the shapes and colors of the oak leaves under it.

The ice on the stream that used to feed the beaver pond was paper thin and wind sculpted. The animals are still having an easy of time finding water but are probably having a hard time getting around on the icy, crusted snow.

A few woodland pools were ice free. They reminded me of the forest walks I’ve taken on moonlit nights when the moonlight shimmers and swims in the dark water of pools like this one. It’s something I haven’t seen in a long time but I’ve had an itch to try night time photography, so it might happen when the moon is full enough to light the way.

Some journeys take you farther from where you come from, but closer to where you belong. ~Ron Franscell

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Yale Forest in Winter Part One

When I visit a place I like to visit it in all four seasons and get to know it a bit, and that’s why I decided to walk in Yale Forest in Swanzey last weekend. It was a cloudy, gray day that wasn’t great for photography but I saw plenty of interesting things and came home happy. It’s amazing how much the look of a place can change between winter and summer, and how many unseen things are revealed when the trees and shrubs no longer have leaves.

The road I followed was once called Dartmouth College Road because if you followed in north far enough, that’s where you would have ended up. When the State Department of Transportation built what is now route 10 this section of road was abandoned and from what I gather by talking to the county forester and others, was taken over by Yale University. I’m not sure exactly how it worked but apparently, since they owned the land on both sides of the road it became theirs when it was abandoned by the state. In any event it is now considered a private road but Yale University is very good about letting locals use the forest for hiking and biking. Since gates on both ends of the road are locked I’m assuming that the tire tracks were made by someone from Yale.

Yale founded a School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in 1900 and owns parcels of forest all over New England. Alumni donated land to the school or it was bought or sometimes even traded, and over time good sized pieces of forest were put together. The first land was bought by the school in 1913 but this particular parcel dates from the 1920s or 30s. It is 1,930 acres in size. A forestry school can’t train foresters in proper forest management without a forest, so this is one of the places where they come to train, and part of that training includes how to maintain healthy woodlands. This parcel is mostly red and white pine that was planted or seeded naturally after the hurricane of 1938 blew down many of the trees that stood here, so none of it is original old growth forest.

Many of the hardwood stumps had sprouted new growth. When I saw this one I thought “deer food.”

Sure enough the deer had eaten the tender tip of every shoot. Deer have their front cutting incisor teeth only on their bottom jaw and these teeth meet a cartilage pad on their top jaw so they tear rather than cut through cleanly, and that tearing can be clearly seen in the photo. This won’t kill the new shoots but it will make them bushier. Selectively cutting a forest and leaving the stumps to re-grow provides valuable winter food to deer.

Now that the ferns and other undergrowth have died back game trails could be seen clearly. The deer use these trails year round but they aren’t as easy to spot in summer and fall. They can be seen in any New Hampshire forest and have probably been used since the dawn of time.

Stone walls and cellar holes are all that’s left to tell of all the back breaking work that once went on here. This particular piece of land is very stony and parts of it are low and wet, so I doubt much crop farming was done here. I’m guessing that it was sheep pasture. Sheep were big business in this area in the 1800s but then railroads came through and the industrial revolution happened and many of these smaller farms were abandoned or sold. The forests grew back and now it’s close to impossible to walk into a New Hampshire forest and not see a stone wall. At one time there were an estimated 250,000 miles of stone walls in the northeast.

White-tipped moss (Hedwigia ciliata) grew on one of the stones in the wall.  This moss was very green and healthy looking and part of that probably had to do with the previous night’s dusting of snow. It was warm enough so the snow had melted and the water from it rejuvenated the mosses and lichens. Many people don’t seem to realize that in spite of the snow the winter landscape can be as dry as a desert until it warms up enough for the snow to melt. I see many mosses and lichens that are as shriveled in January as they are in July.

I like seeing mosses close up, and this is about as close as I could get to the white tipped moss in the previous photo.  At this scale it’s clear where it got its common name, and it’s also clear that it’s a very beautiful thing.

Crowded parchment fungi (Stereum complicatum) jostled for space on a log. There must be some way that growing so close together and in such large numbers benefits this fungus, but I haven’t been able to find out how. I probably see more of it than any other mushroom.

A small tree had fallen between 2 others and was supported so it hung out into the road at about eye level.

I was surprised to see how much growth covered the trunk of the fallen tree. It was like a garden, with several kinds of mosses, lichens and fungi growing all along its entire length.

For years I’ve seen certain dead beech leaves as a kind of peachy orangey-pinkish color but I always thought that I was simply seeing the wrong color due to color blindness. Imagine my surprise when my color finding software told me that these leaves were the color that I thought I’d been seeing all along. Color blindness is very strange in how it works differently for virtually every color. Blue can be purple and red can be brown but apparently peach is always peach.

Deer tongue grass (Dichanthelium clandestinum) added some color to the forest floor.

This beautiful moss grew in a rather large patch on a tree trunk, but too high up to be tree skirt moss (Anomodon attenuates.) Instead I think it might be lesser plait moss (Hypnum pallescens,) which is supposed to be a “shiny, dark ochre-green moss with light green tips that creeps like satin threads over bark and rock.” Its tiny leaves are triangular and egg shaped, and have a long curved tip like a sickle.

Its orange spore capsules were very small and hard to get a good photo of.  Unfortunately my moss book doesn’t say if the spore capsules of lesser plait moss are orange.

Ironically (or maybe not) a tree with a “killer tree” tape on it had fallen. These warnings warn loggers that the tree is dead, diseased or has some other condition that might cause it to fall. In this case it was a valid warning and I was glad it wasn’t windy because there were more still standing.

The killer tree’s wood was orange.  I don’t think I’ve seen that before and I’m not sure what would cause it other than a fungus.

I was fooled once into thinking that I had found a blue lichen, but I hadn’t paid attention and didn’t know that the sticky sap of white pines (Pinus strobus) turned blue in cold weather. Now whenever I find a blue lichen I look around to make sure that I’m not standing near a pine. This one had lost a limb and had dripped quite a lot of sap onto the forest litter below.

I don’t know how old the tree that was dripping sap was but it was huge; easily three feet across. White pines can reach 200 to 250 years old and some can live over 400 years. Its needles contain five times the amount of the vitamin C of lemons and were used by Native Americans to make tea. This knowledge saved many colonists who were dying of scurvy, but instead of using the tree for food and medicine as the Natives did the colonists cut them down and used the wood for paneling, floors and furniture. When square riggers roamed the seas the tallest white pines in the Thirteen Colonies were known as mast pines. They were marked with a broad arrow and were reserved for the Royal Navy, and if you had any sense you didn’t get caught cutting one down. This practice of The King taking the best trees led to the Pine Tree Riot in 1772, which was an open act of rebellion. Colonists cut down and hauled off many marked mast pines in what was just a taste of what would come later on in the American Revolution.

I found a maple dust lichen (Lecanora thysanophora) by accident a few years ago and have hoped to see one again ever since. I finally saw one on the bark of a maple in Yale Forest and this is it. It was maybe an inch across and if I understand what I’ve read correctly you can tell that it’s a maple dust lichen by the tiny fringe around its outer edge. I stood and gazed at it as I would if I were in an art gallery viewing paintings by DaVinci or Rembrandt, because it’s every bit as beautiful.

One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible. ~Louis L’Amour

Thanks for coming by. Part 2 of this post will be along on Saturday.

 

 

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Things I’ve Seen

We’ve had a few really cold days and a little snow but all in all our winter has seen above average temperatures and below average snowfall. I decided to take a walk along the Ashuelot River last weekend to celebrate the relative warmth.

I thought I might see some interesting ice formations since the temperature dropped below freezing the night before, but ice was hard to find. A few baubles had formed on this clump of reed growing in the water.

This one looked like a teardrop. It seems odd that it could have formed in that shape since water drops fall straight down as they freeze, but there it was.

A small but beautiful white feather was trapped in the ice just off shore.  I see quite a few feathers and don’t take photos of all of them but I liked what the water had done to this one.

Ashuelot falls in Keene showed no signs of freezing. The dam that creates the falls was first built in 1775 by Elisha Briggs to power grist and sawmills. It was improved over the years and went from wood to stone, and went on to power woolen mills from 1815 to 1935. There is talk of removing it by some, but others want to use it to generate power. I’m for returning it to its natural state. Meanwhile the river rolls on, not caring one way or another.

Black knot disease grew on a black cherry. It is caused by the fungus Apiosporina morbosa which can also attack plums, peaches, and apricots. Spores from the fungus can be spread by rain or wind and typically infect trees from April through June on new growth. Infected stems swell up and produce hard black knots like those in the above photo. This disease can eventually kill the tree so infected limbs should be pruned off 2-4 inches below the knots and buried or burned before bud break the following spring.

There are many gray lichens with black fruiting bodies (Apothecia) growing on trees but I think this one might be tiny button lichen (Amandinea punctata.) An unusual fact about this lichen is how its gray body (Thallus) can sometimes be missing, leaving only the dark apothecia on the tree bark. Something else unusual about it is its tolerance of pollutants and toxins. Most lichens will refuse to grow where there is air pollution but this one doesn’t seem to mind. That’s not a very comforting thought.

I just spoke about the milk white toothed polypore (Irpex lacteus) not too long ago but I keep running into them and I find them very interesting. This is a “winter” fungus that can appear quite late in the year. It is also a resupinate fungus, which means it looks like it grows upside down, and that’s what many crust fungi seem to do. Their spore bearing surface can be wrinkled, smooth, warty, toothed, or porous and though they appear on the undersides of logs the main body of the fungus is in the wood, slowly decomposing it. This is not a good one to see on a live tree.

An extreme close-up of the milk white toothed polypore’s “teeth” shows that they are just ragged bits of spore bearing tissue. They start life as tubes or pores and break apart and turn brown as they age.

It seems like the hairy berries of staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) would be hard for a bird to swallow but apparently not, because many birds eat them. Native Americans used these berries for thousands of years to make a lemonade substitute that I’ve always wanted to try, and in some countries the berries are ground and used as a lemon flavored spice. It makes me wonder if birds have taste buds. If so they must like lemon flavoring.

I thought this yellow ornamental grass was beautiful against the white of the snow in a public garden. Unfortunately it has encroached on what looks to be a dwarf spirea and I’m glad that I’m not the one who has to weed it out. I’m not sure what the name of the grass is but after some research I’m leaning toward a Japanese forest grass called Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola.’  This grass is said to be shade tolerant and makes a good companion plant for hosta, ferns, and other shade lovers. But not spirea, apparently.

Canadian hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees surround my house and that’s a good thing because black capped chickadees love their tiny seeds and that means I get to hear their song all year long. My favorite season is spring when I can hear the male bird’s sad but beautiful Fee Bee mating call. In fact I’ve heard it for such a long time and now it doesn’t feel like spring unless I do.

A wound or a branch stub is an excellent place for a tree to become infected by fungi in the winter months when it is dormant. In spring and throughout the growing season the tree tries to heal its wound and produces callus tissue around the site of the infection. When winter returns the infection appears once again and once again in the warmer months the tree tries to heal with more callus tissue. This infection / healing cycle year after year is called perennial canker and it produced the ring like growth seen in the photo above. Though it doesn’t always kill the tree it always seems to make them look sad, and In this case it’s no wonder; to add insult to injury a woodpecker has been pecking at the wound on this tree.

Imagine; green grass in January. It’s a rare winter sight here, especially when it has survived being snowed on.

I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful — an endless prospect of magic and wonder. ~Ansel Adams

Thanks for stopping in.

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A Winter Walk

We had another snow storm recently and though we didn’t get that much snow it did have to be plowed. The worst part of this storm was the long stretch of freezing drizzle that came after the snow. It glazed the top of the snow in a thick coating of very slippery ice, so I had my Yaktrax on for this walk up the old abandoned road that follows Beaver Brook in Keene.

This shot will give you an idea of just how icy it was. The crust was thick enough for me to walk on without breaking through, which is unusual. When I was a boy I went sledding in this kind of snow just once. The runners of the sled broke through the crust and it stopped dead, but I didn’t. I flew off the front of the sled into the sharp crusty snow and got a nasty gash on my chin that I didn’t think would ever stop bleeding. I’ve been wary of this kind of snow ever since. It can be tricky to walk on.

There was blue sky to be seen but also enough clouds to blot out the sun for most of the time.

Enough snow came with this second storm to fully cover the forest floor.

I like seeing the ice formations in winter but Beaver Brook had very little ice on it. After the warmest December ever recorded our January temperatures have also been above average so far, but the month is young. As we found out during the last two winters, it can get awfully cold in a hurry.

Our evergreen ferns look dainty and fragile but they can stand up to some fierce weather. I didn’t look closely but I think that this one was an intermediate wood fern (Dryopteris intermedia) because of the shorter leaflets (Pinnae) at the base of its stem (Stipe) and the scales along the lower part of its stem.

This one grew out of a log as if it was spring. I think it might be another younger intermediate wood fern (Dryopteris intermedia.)

This is the place where I began to pay attention to the beautiful smoky eye boulder lichens (Porpidia albocaerulescens) that grow on the ledges. They taught me that lichens can be pruinose, which means they can have a waxy coating that reflects light much like the whitish bloom on blueberries. These (sometimes) blue disks are called apothecia and are where the lichen’s spores are produced. The wax coating makes them appear blue in the right light and their black border makes them really stand out from the body (Thallus) of the lichen. In certain light the apothecia can also appear more gray than blue.

The base of this hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) was covered in a yellow crust fungus. I think it might have been the conifer parchment fungus (Stereum sanguinolentum,) which is also called the bleeding parchment because of the red colored juice they exude when they’re scratched or injured. This example was very thin and dry and probably wouldn’t have reacted if I had scratched it. Conifer parchment fungus can cause brown heart rot, which is a reddish brown discoloration in the wood of conifers.

The thin papery bark on this yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis) had peeled back to show its lenticels. Lenticels are corky pores that allow gases like oxygen to reach the living cells of the bark. Without enough oxygen, bark can die. Yellow birch likes rich, moist, and cool soils so we don’t see them as often as white birch. In this place it grows well on the shaded side of the road, but there isn’t a single example found on the sunny side.

Winter has teeth and it will bite the unprepared. I met someone here who wore only sneakers and he said “I don’t know what I was thinking when I put sneakers on to come up here!” He was having a hard time of it and I would imagine that his feet were soaking wet and very cold by the time he made it out of here.

Every nature walk seems to come with its own bit of mystery and this one was no different. I’ve never seen this lichen before and don’t know its name. I know that it’s a gray crustose lichen, but that’s about all. I don’t know what the dark outlines signify either but they make it look like some kind of ancient petroglyph.

While I was following the brook and trying to get a shot of a placid pool I didn’t notice the blue of the sky that the rushing water reflected, nor did I see the yellow sulfur dust lichen (Chrysothrix chlorina) on the stone. I’m not surprised; the camera often sees things that I don’t.

Someone turned the old drain pipe into a peace pipe. Being able to see this pipe shows how much of the road Beaver Brook has eaten away over the years.

I made it all the way to Beaver Brook Falls but the path down to the brook was too icy for me, so I took this shot from the road, where the view is marred by brush. The falls were roaring as usual and showed no sign of freezing. I was surprised when I came here last year and saw the falls  frozen into a huge lump of ice. The ice muffled almost all sound and it was the one and only time that I’ve ever heard so little sound in this place. When you expect the roar of rushing water silence can seem amazing.

Typically, the sun came out from behind the clouds just as I was leaving, but I don’t mind an occasional cloudy day. Last summer was made up of an almost endless string of sunny, cloudless skies and I learned then what the term “too much of a good thing” really meant.

By walking in a snowy forest you can really forget about this world, and every time you forget about this world you leave this world, and every time you leave this world you gain a very special wisdom that does not exist in this world. ~Mehmet Murat ildan

Thanks for coming by.

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Looking Back

I’ve never done one but since year in review posts seem to be becoming more popular, I thought I’d give it a try. The hardest part seems to be choosing which photo to show for each month. I struggled with trying to decide at times, so some months have two. I’ll start with a reader favorite from last January; this shot of vole tracks on the snow seemed to draw a lot of comments.

Another reader favorite from last January and a favorite of mine as well was this shot of red elderberry buds (Sambucus racemosa.) I remember wondering why the bud scales were opening so early in the year since they’re there to protect the bud. We must have had a warm spell, but I remember it being very cold.

There was no warmth in February, as this photo of the Ashuelot River in Swanzey shows. We had below zero F cold for long periods throughout the month and the river froze from bank to bank. That’s very rare in this spot and when it happens you know it has been cold.

Despite of the cold of February in March the skunk cabbages (Symplocarpus foetidus) appeared right on schedule, signaling the start of the growing season.  Through a process called thermogenesis in which plants create their own heat, skunk cabbage can raise the temperature above the surrounding air temperature. This means it can melt its way through ice and snow, which is exactly what it had done before I took this photo. Skunk cabbage is in the arum family.

In April the tiny female flowers of our native hazelnuts (Corylus americana) appear and I’m always pleased to see them. I measured the buds with calipers once and found that they were about the same diameter as a strand of spaghetti, so you really have to look closely to find the flowers.

In May the beautiful downy angel wing-like leaves of American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) begin to appear. Seeing them just after they’ve opened is one of the great delights of a walk in the forest in spring, in my opinion.  Beech is the tree that taught me how leaves open in the spring. I won’t bother explaining it here but it’s a fascinating process.

Since mayflowers, also known as trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens,) were one of my grandmother’s favorites I had to include them here. They are also one of the most searched for flowers on this blog. I’m anxious to smell their heavenly scent again already, and it’s only January.

In June I stopped to take a photo of the red sandspurry (Spergularia rubra) that I’d been ignoring for so long. These are easily among the smallest flowers I’ve ever tried to photograph, but also among the most beautiful. Though they’re considered an invasive weed from Europe I don’t see how something so tiny can be considered a pest. They are small enough so about all I can see is their color when I view them in person, so I was surprised by their delicate beauty when I saw them in a photo. I’ll be watching for them again this year.

July is when our roadside meadows really start to attract attention. There are beautiful scenes like this one virtually everywhere you look. For me these scenes are always bitter sweet because though they are beautiful and bring me great joy, they also mark the quick passing of summer.

In August I saw this little yellow legged tail wagger at a local pond. I didn’t know its name but luckily readers did. It’s a cute little juvenile spotted sandpiper, which is not something I expect to see on the shore of a pond in New Hampshire.  It must have been used to seeing people because it went about searching the shore and let me take as many photos as I wished.

August was also when my daughter pointed me to this violet coral fungus (Clavaria zollingeri,) easily the most beautiful coral fungus that I’ve ever seen. It grew in a part of the woods with difficult lighting and I had to try many times to get a photo that I felt accurately reproduced its color. I plan to go back in August of this year and see if it will grow in the same spot again. Stumbling across rare beauty like this is what gets my motor running and that’s why I’m out there every day. You can lose yourself in something so beautiful and I highly recommend doing so as often as possible.

According to reader comments this aging purple cort mushroom (Cortinarius iodeoides) was the hit of the September 12th post. This mushroom starts life shiny and purple and then develops white and yellow streaks as it ages. Its shine when young comes from a very bitter slime that covers it. Only slugs don’t mind the bitterness apparently, because squirrels and chipmunks never seem to touch it.

In October all that was left blooming were a few of our various native asters and goldenrods. The temperature was getting cool enough to slow down the bumblebees, sometimes to the point of their not moving at all. It’s hard to imagine anything more perfect in nature than a bee sleeping in a flower.

This was my favorite shot in October, mostly because the fallen leaves remind me of shuffling through them as a schoolboy. And I’ll never forget that smell.  If only I could describe it.

But leaves are always more beautiful on the tree, as this November photo of Willard Pond in Antrim shows. The oaks and beeches were more colorful than I’ve ever seen them and I could only stand in awe after I entered the forest. It was total immersion in one of the most beautiful forests I’ve ever been in.

Then strangely, on Friday November 6th, all the leaves fell from nearly every oak in one great rush. People said they had never seen anything like it. I got word from Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine, saying the same thing happened in those states on the exact same day. It will be interesting to see what the oaks do this year. I can’t find a single word about the strange phenomenon on the news or in any publication, or online, so I can’t tell you what science has to say about it. The post I did on Willard Pond generated more comments than any other ever has on this blog.

It was also in November when Yoda the porcupine slowly waddled his way across a Walpole meadow and sat at my feet. I wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted but I wondered if maybe he just wished to have his photo taken. After all, I could tell that he had just seen his stylist by his perfectly groomed hair. I was happy to oblige and this is one of the photos taken that day. He was just too cute to not include here.

This one I’m sure most of you remember since it just appeared in the December 9th post. That was when I decided to do an entire post with nothing but photos that I had taken with my phone, and this was the winner, according to you. It’s a simple snapshot of some water plants that I saw in Half Moon Pond in Hancock one foggy morning, and it showed me that you don’t need to go out and spend thousands of dollars on camera equipment to be a nature photographer. Or a nature blogger.

So you don’t think that I just click the shutter and get a perfect photo each time, I’ve included this little gem. The oddest thing about it is, I don’t know how or where it was taken. It just appeared on the camera’s memory card so I must have clicked the shutter without realizing it. It illustrates why for every photo that appears on this blog there are many, many more that don’t.

Perhaps you need to look back before you can move ahead. ~Alan Brennert

Thanks for stopping in. As always, I hope readers will be able to get out and experience some of the beauty and serenity that nature has to offer in the New Year.

 

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