Beaver Brook in Winter

One of the strangest things I’ve found in nature is when a normally roaring brook is muffled by ice, so last weekend I went up to Beaver Brook to see if it had been muffled or if it was still singing. As this photo shows, it was singing. Loudly.

There were places though, where the ice had almost grown from bank to bank. The ice doesn’t quiet it absolutely but very close, and it’s an eerie thing to know a brook is there and not be able to hear it.

Icicles hung from the edges of ice shelves but they weren’t as impressive as in years past. This has been such a warm winter. It gets cool and snows but then it warms up and the snow melts, and then it happens again, so we have no real snow depth. The reason it has lasted here is because Beaver Brook flows through a shaded canyon between two hills.

I saw more ice on the ledges that line the old road than on the brook.

An evergreen fern waited patiently for spring.

What I call the color changing lichen had put on its lavender / blue coat. My color finding software sees more “steel blue” than any other color but in the warm months this lichen is ash gray. When I see it I always wonder how many other lichens change color. This one is granular and crustose and I’ve never been able to identify it.

I didn’t want to get too close to where the color changing lichen grew because the ledges here are unstable and large pieces have been falling recently. Cracks like this one are caused by water running into them and freezing. The expanding ice makes the crack bigger and bigger and eventually the stone falls, pried away from the ledge face by the ice.

On the hillsides above me there were many fallen trees. Since there are electric lines running through here they have to be cut when they fall on the wires.

I was sorry to see that one of the fallen trees was an old beech with hundreds of beechnut husks on it. These nuts are an important food source for many different animals but I hardly see them at all.

A maple leaf had such beautiful color it stopped me in my tracks and held me mesmerized for a time. I took far too many photos of it but colorful maple leaves are unexpected in February.

I think it has been over a year since I last saw the yellow jelly fungus (Tremella mesenterica) called witches butter, even though they’re fairly common. Though jelly fungi grow at all times of year I think of them as winter fungi because that’s usually when I find them. I often see them on fallen branches, often oak or alder, and I always wonder how they got way up in the tree tops. We also have black, white, red, orange and amber jelly fungi and I’d have to say that white and red are the rarest. I think I’ve seen each color only two or three times. An odd fact about jelly fungi is that they can be parasitic on other fungi.

There are lots of striped maples (Acer pensylvanicum) growing along Beaver Brook. They have colorful twigs and buds and are among the easiest trees to identify no matter what time of year because of the green and white vertical stripes on their bark. Their terminal buds have two scales and are valvate, meaning they have two bud scales. Striped maple is very fussy about where it grows and will not stand pollution, heat, or drought. It likes cool, shady places with sandy soil that stays moist. They bloom in June and have very pretty green bell shaped blossoms.

Hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides) also does well along the brook. Their buds are naked, meaning they have no scales to protect them, so they have wooly hair instead. This photo shows that the flower bud in the center and the two leaf buds on either side are clothed more in wool than hair, but they come through the coldest winters and still bloom beautifully each spring.

The chubby little green and purple buds of red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa) are some of my favorites, but I don’t see them often. Lucky they grow along the brook in places so I could admire them on this day. Red elderberry buds have imbricate scales, meaning they overlap like shingles. Soon the buds will swell and the purple scales will pull back to reveal the green scales underneath.

Here was something I’ve never seen; the normally round buds of red elderberry had elongated. There were several that had done this and I can’t figure out why they would have. Maybe they can gather more sunlight with this shape and are evolving right before the eyes that care enough to watch.

When light rain or drizzle falls on cold snow it can freeze into a crust and that’s what had happened during the last storm. The shiny crust can be very hard to capture on film but here it is, on the other side of the brook. Crusty snow can be awfully hard to walk on because it acts like it will support your weight, but at the last minute it breaks and your foot falls through it. Having it happen over and over makes for a jarring and tiring walk.

A tree fell perfectly and wrapped its arms around another.

Native witch hazels (Hamamelis virginiana) also line the banks of Beaver Brook. This is a shot of the recently opened seed pods, which explode with force and can throw the seeds as far as 30 feet. I’ve read that you can hear them pop when they open and even though I keep trying to be there at the right time to see and hear it happening, I never am. Seeing the ice on the one on the left, I’m wondering if the pods hold water.

I like to visit my old friend the stair-step moss (Hylocomium splendens) when I’m here. It’s a very beautiful moss that grows on stones as far north as the arctic tundra. It seems fairly rare here; this is the only example that I’ve seen, and it doesn’t seem to be spreading. When dry stair step moss has a slight satiny sheen to it, and that’s probably how it came by its other common name of glittering wood-moss. The name stair step moss comes from the way the new growth “steps up” off the midrib of the previous year’s branch.  Each year a new branch grows from the old and this growth habit allows stair step moss to grow up and over other mosses. It is said that you can tell the age of the moss by counting these steps.

The liverwort called greater whipwort (Bazzania trilobata) was frozen absolutely solid. Even frozen it still reminds me of centipedes. It’s very easy to mistake this common liverwort for moss so you have to look closely. The root-like growths are new branches. They aren’t always present but sometimes there will be a lot of them as there were here. This was a happy liverwort, even though it was frozen.

This scene of green algae in a seep reminded me of spring. Hydrologically speaking a seep is a wet place where water reaches the surface from an underground aquifer. This seep is a warm one; in all the years I’ve known it I’ve never seen it completely freeze. Seeps don’t have a single point of origin like a spring, instead they form a puddle that never dries up and doesn’t flow. They’re an important water source for many small animals and birds and unusual plants and fungi can often be found in and around them.

The waters of the stream played the part of the orchestra, and the sunlight provided the dancers. Every now and then a crescendo of wind highlighted the symphony in the clearing by the creek.
~Edward Mooney Jr.

Thanks for coming by.

 

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Robin Hood Park

Robin Hood Park is a 110-acre park located in the northeastern corner of Keene that I visit often at all times of year, but especially in summer to see all of the amazing fungi and slime molds that grow there. In 1889 George A. Wheelock sold a piece of land known as the Children’s Wood to the City of Keene for a total of one dollar. This area was eventually combined with an additional parcel of land purchased from Wheelock, known as Robin Hood Forest, to form Robin Hood Park. This park has been enjoyed by children of all ages ever since. I decided to go there last Saturday because I couldn’t remember the last time I had been there.

The small pond in the park has drawn ice skaters for a very long time, but this year the unusual warmth has kept people off the ice. This is where I learned how to ice skate 50+ years ago.

There are various small streams and rivulets that feed into the pond. Even though it was only 22 degrees F. on this day none of them had frozen over but they were trying, as this one shows.

There were lots of bubbles in what ice there was.

The spot where the little stream enters the pond showed just how thin the ice was.

But still, even with all the warnings both natural and man-made, someone had shoveled off a large rectangle to skate in. We humans can be very stupid at times. Note how wet the snow is where the water is coming up through the crack in the ice.

I got away from the pond and followed the trail that leads around it. There are many interesting things along this trail and I see things I’ve never seen almost every time I come.

Unfortunately there was nothing new about the thick ice on parts of the trail. There is a lot of groundwater here and ice like this is common in winter so I wore my new micro spikes. With them on I walked right over this ice and didn’t slip or slide one bit. It’s amazing how they grip; you feel like you couldn’t slip if you wanted to.

One of the things I saw on this day that I’ve never seen before is a liverwort called the Bifid crestwort (Lophocolea bidentata.) It grew on a log and at first I thought it was a moss.

But I’ve never seen a moss that looked like this and I suspected right off that it must be some type of liverwort. It is a leafy liverwort and each leaf is flattened with two notches at its tip (Bilobed.) Each lobe is drawn out to a long, narrow point. As you move up the stem the leading edge of each leaf is tucked behind the trailing edge of the leaf ahead of it. Both of these features help with identification as does the pale yellow green color. What I didn’t know at the time I saw it is that the plant is very aromatic, so the next time I see it I’ll have to smell it.

There was no question that this was a moss. Broom moss (Dicranum scoparium) gets its name from the way its curly tipped leaves look like they have all been swept to one side. In fact the scoparium part of the scientific name is Latin for broom. It prefers dry shaded places and won’t tolerate wet feet. Florists call it mood moss but I’m not sure why.

Mosses can change color in the cold and so can lichens. In the summer the blue gray lichens on this stone will become ashen gray and all but disappear into the color of the stone. It’s something I’ve noticed happening for years but I’ve never been able to identify the chameleon like lichen.

This buttressed tree root reminded me of a beautiful yellow slime mold I saw here one day a few years ago. Buttressed tree roots usually grow on all sides of the tree but this huge old oak has just the one. Roots that grow like this are said to grow because of nutrient poor, shallow soil but if that were true then it seems like all of the trees in this forest would have them. They are usually found in rain forests on very tall trees.

Something I’ve never been able to explain is the zig zag scar on this tree. I’ve shown it here before and blog readers have kicked around several ideas including lightning, but none seem to really fit.

The scar is deep and starts about 5 feet up the trunk from the soil line. If it were a lightning scar I would think that it would travel from the top of the tree into the soil. I happened upon a large white pine tree once that had been hit by lightning very recently and it had a perfectly straight scar from its top, down a root, and into the soil. The bark had been blown off all the way along it.

I’ve seen some strange things in the woods and this is one of them. Someone put a chain around this tree for no apparent reason. What will happen is the tree will grow around it and over time simply absorb it. It will become a tree cutters nightmare; one of those thing you hope you never run into with a chainsaw.

This granite stone has a spear of either quartz or feldspar in it. I think, if I remember my geology correctly, that it would be called an intrusion or vein. Granite itself is considered an intrusive igneous rock.

Turkey tail fungi (Trametes versicolor) are common enough but you don’t often find them growing on a standing tree as these were. There were many hundreds of them all around the tree.

Some of the turkey tails were quite colorful with lots of orange and lavender bands.

Other turkey tails on the same tree were much less colorful and this is interesting. For years I’ve tried to find out what determines the color of these fungi and I assumed it must be the wood itself, but these examples with widely varying colors were all growing on the same wood, so that can’t be it. These are in fact wood eaters which decompose wood so it can be returned to the forest soil to be used again by a new generation of trees. Life is a circle and not a single molecule is lost or wasted.

When I was a boy I found a book in the attic called “Nibbles and Bobtail.” It was all about animals of the forest acting like people, and their escapades. The animals lived in stone houses with thatched roofs and had fields bordered by stone walls. I was in my drawing phase then and I was interested in illustration, but this book bothered me because everything made of stone was colored. There were red stones, blue stones, orange, yellow, purple stones, etc. I thought well, it’s obvious this person has never seen a stone wall; everyone knows they’re gray. But it was I who didn’t know what I was talking about because instead of seeing I was just looking, and it took several years for me to finally see that stone walls could indeed be very colorful, as this one shows. Not only are the stones colorful but the lichens on them are as well. The orange in this photo is caused by the sidewalk firedot lichen (Caloplaca feracissima.)

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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