Things I’ve Seen

This is something I’ve never seen before; the Ashuelot River is so low that it has stopped falling over the dam on West Street in Keene. I’ve known this section of river all my life. I used to fish here at the dam when I was a boy and they still fish for trout, pickerel and sunfish here today. This dam is known as the Faulkner and Colony dam because it was built around 1777 by that company to power their woolen mill. A few years ago there was talk about removing it to open up the river and another idea would refurbish it to generate power but I haven’t heard anything lately about either idea. I like the thought of restoring the river to what it once was without any dams on it. Two other dams have been removed in the past 20 years; one in Swanzey and one in Hinsdale. They were timber crib dams though; this one is granite block.

When gravel bars like these appear in the river it shows low the water really is. It’s amazing how quickly plants will take over these islands.

Though we haven’t had any rain we’ve had several cool nights and cool air over warm water always means mist, as this shot of Half Moon Pond in Hancock shows.

There are highbush blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum) on the shores of almost all of our ponds and this year they’ve changed into their fall colors early. They’re beautiful in the fall and rival the colors of the invasive burning bush (Euonymus elatus.)

Though I still haven’t found enough mushrooms to do a full mushroom post I still occasionally find examples that can apparently stand the dryness. Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) mushrooms usually grow in large groups, so I was surprised to find this single one growing in an old woodpile. Another common name for them is sulfur shelf though I’ve worked with sulfur and this mushroom doesn’t remind me of it. The name chicken of the woods comes from the way they taste like chicken when cooked. Finding bright colors in the woods at any time of year is always a surprise and I always feel grateful that I am able to see them. This example was about as big as a dinner plate.

I’ve read that as they age chicken of the woods mushrooms lose their orange color and this one did just that over the course of a day or two. I’ve seen other examples however that have never lost their color, even as they rotted away.

Hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa,) is another edible polypore that often grows in the same spot year after year. They are said to look like the back of a brown hen’s ruffled feathers, and that’s how they come by their common name. I’ve seen only two this year and both were cracked like you can see here.

I’ve had quite a time trying to identify this pretty little bolete and I’m still not sure I’ve got it right but most of the signs point to the red mouth bolete (Boletus subvelutipes) which has a variable colored cap that can be tawny red to yellowish and a red pore bearing surface. One identifying feature that I don’t see on this mushroom is the dark red velvety hairs that are “usually” found at the base of the stalk.

The pore surface of the red mouth bolete is bright scarlet red with yellow at the edges, and this fits the example I found. The red mouth bolete also stains purple at the slightest touch and you can see purple spots on the cap and stem of this example. If it isn’t the red mouth bolete I hope someone can tell me what it is. I found it growing under oaks and hemlocks and by the way, I’ve read that you should never eat a bolete with a red spore surface.

I found some orange fan shaped jelly fungi (Dacryopinax spathularia) growing on a log. Some fungi look like they are erupting from the cracks in the bark and this is one of them. It is an edible fungus which, according to Wikipedia, in China is sometimes included in a vegetarian dish called Buddha’s delight.

As well as fan shaped this small fungus is spatula shaped unlike other jellies that are brain like, and that’s where the spathularia part of the scientific name comes from. This is the first time I’ve seen them.

What I believe were common stinkhorns (Phallus impudicus) have appeared despite the dryness. Their caps looked a bit dry, ragged and tattered and they didn’t last for more than a day. These fungi have an  odor like rotting meat when they pass on.  

The green conical cap is sometimes slimy like this example was. It uses its carrion like odor to attract insects, which are said to disperse its sticky spores. This photo shows its spongy stalk, which feels hollow.

Graceful Hindu dancers glided across the forest floor in the guise of yellow spindle coral (Clavulinopsis fusiformis) mushrooms. Each tiny cylinder is about the same diameter as a piece of cooked spaghetti. This species usually grows in tight clusters, often in the hard packed soil on the side of the trail, but I’ve found them on the forest floor as well.

It’s apple picking time here in New Hampshire and apples are a big business. These examples are red delicious but my personal favorite is an old fashioned variety called northern spy. Northern spy is almost impossible to find in stores these days because they don’t ship well, but you might get lucky at a local orchard. I think many people are surprised to learn that apple trees are not native to the United States. They have all come from old world stock brought over in the 1600s. Apples from Europe were grown in the Jamestown colony and the first non-native apple orchard was planted in Boston in 1625. Only the crab apple is native to this country and they were once called “common” apples. The Native American Abenaki tribe called them “apleziz” and used them for food as well as medicinally.

Peaches are also ripe and ready. Many people, including people who live here, don’t realize that peaches can be grown in New Hampshire but they’ve been grown here for many years.

River grapes (Vitis riparia) are ripe and they’re disappearing quickly. They grow on the banks of rivers and streams, and that’s how they come by the name. They are also called frost grapes because of their extreme cold hardiness. Many birds eat these small grapes including cardinals, mockingbirds, catbirds, robins, wood ducks, several species of woodpecker, cedar waxwings, blue jays, and turkeys. Many animals also love grapes, including foxes, rabbits, raccoons, skunks and opossums. Deer will eat the leaves and new shoots and many birds use the bark for nest building; especially crows. I went back about a week after I took this photo and every grape was gone.

I thought I’d have a hard time identifying these tiny galls I found growing on the underside of an oak leaf but they were relatively easy to find, even though little to nothing is known about the insect that caused them. Dryocosmus deciduous galls are created when a tiny wasp in the Dryocosmus genus lays eggs on the midrib of a red oak leaf. Each tiny gall has a single larva inside. As the scientific name reveals, these galls are deciduous, and fall from the leaf before the leaf falls from the tree.

Gypsy moth egg cases look like they were pasted onto the bark of a tree. European gypsy moths were first brought to the U.S. in 1869 from Europe to start a silkworm business but they escaped and have been in the wild ever since. In the 1970s and 80s gypsy moth outbreaks caused many millions of dollars of damage across the northeast by defoliating and killing huge swaths of forest. I remember seeing, in just about every yard, black stripes of tar painted around tree trunks or silvery strips of aluminum foil wrapped around trunks. The theory was that when the caterpillars crawled up the trunk of a tree to feed they would either get stuck in the tar or slip on the aluminum foil and fall back to the ground. Today, decades later, you can still see the black stripes of tar around some trees. Another gypsy moth population explosion happened in Massachusetts recently and that’s why foresters say that gypsy moth egg cases should be destroyed whenever they’re found.

Though we’ve had some freezing weather turtles seem to have shrugged it off. I don’t know what this one was standing on but I hope it wasn’t the river bottom. If the river is that low they’ll be in trouble.

Mallards are not as tame here as they seem to be in other places and usually when I take a photo of them all I get is tail feathers, but this group showed me a side view. The water of the river glowed in the sunlight like I’ve never seen. What would it be like I wondered, to be swimming along with them, surrounded by this this beautiful glowing light. Bliss, I think.

A great blue hereon found enough water in the river to get knee deep. As soon as it saw me it pretended to be a statue so I left it in stasis and moved on. When it comes to patience these birds have far more than I do, but they’ve also taught me to have more than I once did.  

I thought I’d leave you with a view of coming attractions. Fall came early and is moving quickly this year. Almost all the leaves are already gone from these trees since I took this photo.

Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. ~Radhanath Swami

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The Last of the Fall Color?

Well, the growing season is about finished here since we’ve had a freeze, but we were very lucky to have fall colors go on and on the way they did. This photo of Mount Monadnock was taken from a spot where I’ve never viewed it before. It was early on a cloudy morning, bordering on twilight, but boosting the camera’s ISO function showed me what you see here. The mountain had its head in the clouds again but there was plenty of color to be seen.

There was mist on Half Moon Pond in Hancock one morning. It’s been a very misty fall, I’ve noticed.

You could barely see the hill on the other side of the pond.

But when the mists cleared it was beautiful.

I’ve been trying for several years now to get a shot of the full moon over Half Moon Pond, and this year I finally got it.

I’ve known witch alders (Fothergilla major) for a long time but apparently I never paid them any mind in the fall. They’re quite pretty. This is a native shrub related to witch hazel which grows to about 6-7 feet in this area. Though native to the southeast it does well here in the northeast, but it is almost always seen in gardens rather than in the wild. The fragrant flower heads are bottlebrush shaped and made up of many flowers that have no petals. What little color they have comes from the stamens, which have tiny yellow anthers at the ends of long white filaments.

The yellow leaves are from black birch and the white bark is from a gray birch, so we have black, white, and gray subjects in color.

Blackberries can be quite beautiful in the fall with their deep maroon / purple leaves.

The maple leaved viburnums (Viburnum acerifolium) have been beautiful this year. Their leaves seem to start out colored just about any color you can name in the fall, but after their red / yellow / orange/ purple phases all of the leaves eventually become a very pale, ghostly pink, making this shrub’s fall color among the most beautiful in the forest, in my opinion.

Maple leaved viburnum berries (drupes) are about the size of raisins and I’ve heard that they don’t taste very good, but many birds and animals eat them. They disappear quickly and getting a shot of both fall colored leaves and fruit is difficult.

What else can I say about the red maples? They’re just so beautiful with their many beautiful colors at various times of year.

This bracket fungus had the autumn spirit.

I had high hopes that I’d see the burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) along the Ashuelot River in Swanzey go all the way this year, showing leaves of the lightest pastel pink before they fell, but unfortunately a freeze saw all the leaves drop overnight last week, so this photo of them in much darker pink will have to do. Burning bushes might lose their leaves quickly some years but the berries will persist until birds have eaten every one of them. That’s what makes them one of the most invasive plants in the area and that is why their sale and cultivation have been banned in New Hampshire.

Here’s a closer look at the burning bushes. It’s too bad that they’re so invasive because they really are beautiful, especially when massed in the thousands as they are in this spot.

We’ve had some ferocious winds this year but I’ve been lucky enough to find still waters for tree reflections.

The beeches have also been beautiful this year but once they started they turned fast and most now wear brown. I thought this young example was very beautiful.

There are over 200 viburnum varieties and many grow as natives here. Smooth arrow wood (Viburnum dentatum) is one of them. It has yellowish white, mounded flower clusters and blooms along stream banks and drainage ditches. The flowers become dark blue drupes that birds love. You can see some of them in this photo. It is said that this plant’s common name comes from Native Americans using the straight stems for arrow shafts. They also used the shrub medicinally and its fruit for food. It’s quite pretty in the fall as well.

Staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) are one of our most colorful shrubs in the fall. They can range from lemon yellow to pumpkin orange to tomato red, and anything in between. These examples were mostly orange.

But this sumac was very red.

I thought I’d end this post with a leftover photo from my last trip up Pitcher Mountain in Stoddard. I finally hit the peak color up there at just the right time this year and it was so glorious I hated to come down. They were truly some of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few.

So many hues in nature and yet nothing remains the same, every day, every season a work of genius, a free gift from the Artist of artists. ~E.A. Bucchianeri

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More Fall Color

Fall foliage is peaking here and our world is very colorful at the moment; it’s almost like living inside a kaleidoscope. This view is found at Howe Reservoir in Dublin, New Hampshire and though it was a cloudy and rather dark morning the camera did a fair job, I thought.

Here is another view of the trees at the reservoir. Mostly red maples, I think. Red maples can have red fall foliage, or yellow or orange.

Mount Monadnock, the second most climbed mountain in the world, was covered by clouds in this shot of the reservoir. The trees are beautiful here this year as they are most years.

This is a colorful part of my journey to work.

I raced to catch the sun lighting up the entire hill on the far side of Half Moon Pond in Hancock one morning, but I just missed it. Too bad; in six years I’ve only seen it happen twice.

The shoreline of Half Moon Pond is natural for the most part, with no buildings.

If I don’t take the dirt road I showed a few photos back I can choose a route that takes me past an excellent view of Mount Monadnock, but on this morning the mountain was hiding behind clouds. 

But even the clouds were worthy of a few photos, I thought. It’s hard to believe such a huge mountain is behind them.

On my way home after work the sun lights up this roadside pasture and hillside in Marlborough. Every year I struggle with whether sunny or cloudy days are best for foliage photos. By the end of the season I’ve usually tied myself in knots and still have no good answer, but it seems to me that these colors might have popped more on a cloudy day. 

Here’s the same hillside but this shot was taken on a cloudy day. To me it seems much more colorful than the previous shot but I’ll let you decide.

Those cows have one of the best views in the region.

A closer look at one of those maples you’ve been seeing in all of these photos. Sometimes red, yellow and orange can all be found on one tree.

Oaks are coming along and they and the beeches will take over when the maples are done. At least I hope so. This tells me that it’s time to get over to Willard Pond in Hancock; one of the most beautiful places I know of in the fall when the oaks and beeches blaze with color.

The Branch River in Marlborough is always a good place to see some color. The bright yellow on the left is Oriental Bittersweet, which is invasive.

Here is more bright yellow Oriental bittersweet in the trees along the Ashuelot River in Swanzey. Invasive oriental bittersweet vines (Celastrus orbiculatus) are as strong as wire and they strangle many native trees by wrapping themselves around the tree’s trunk like a boa constrictor. I’ve seen vines as big as my arm wrapped tightly around trees so as the trees grew they had no room to expand and slowly died. At this time of year you can see how they’ve made it into the tops of many trees.

Another of my favorite places to see fall colors is along the Ashuelot River in Keene. You can probably see why.

Another view from the riverside.

There is a spot along the Ashuelot River in Swanzey where thousands of invasive burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) grow, and in the fall they all turn red and pink. You can see some of them around the base of the trees in the distance.

Here’s a close look at the leaves. Though beautiful these understory shrubs take a lot of shade and can form monocultures in the forest. They in turn cast enough shade so natives can’t get a start.  Burning bushes often turn unbelievable shades of pink and a forest full of them is truly an amazing sight. Their sale and cultivation is banned in New Hampshire but there are so many of them in the wild they’ll always be with us now.

Just before burning bush leaves fall they’ll turn a soft, very pale pastel pink. The leaves on the trees above them seem to help regulate how quickly burning bush leaves change color by keeping frost from touching them. In years when the overhanging branches lose their leaves early there is a good chance that the burning bushes will also lose theirs quickly. There have been years when I’ve seen hundreds of bushes all lose their leaves overnight.

The New Hampshire Tourism Bureau estimates that more than three million out-of-state overnight visitors will come this fall, but unfortunately most won’t see scenes like this one because they will drive through our forests in a car or on a bus. They really should spend more time hiking, because this is the time of year when nature pulls out all the stops and reminds us what the word beauty really means.

Over everything connected with autumn there lingers some golden spell–some unseen influence that penetrates the soul with its mysterious power. ~Northern Advocate

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Tenant Swamp

In 2010 Keene built a new middle school at the edge of a 500 acre wetland called Tenant Swamp and the building sits on a high terrace that overlooks the swamp. To create an “outdoor classroom” for the students a boardwalk leading into the swamp was also built. I frequently drive by tenant swamp at this time of year and note the beautiful fall foliage that can be seen from the road and I’ve always wondered what the fall foliage would look like from inside the swamp. That’s what this trip would be about on this beautiful day.

A sturdy bridge built over a seasonal stream leads into the swamp.

An 850 foot boardwalk meanders through the swamp. It’s sturdy and well-built and about a foot or two off the ground. When it was being installed 9-12 feet of peat was discovered in some places. Two feet of peat takes about a thousand years to form so this peat has been here for a very long time. I’m tempted to call this a peat bog because of these discoveries but technically because it is forested, the correct term is swamp.

I was happy to see that there was some nice fall color here inside the swamp in addition to the beautiful colors I had seen on the outer edges.  

The swamp is left to itself as much as possible and when trees fall they lie where they fell.

I saw lots of New England asters in sunny spots and I’m guessing that this swamp must be full of them and many other plants that I’d love to see.

There were lots of blueberry bushes here as well, and most were wearing their beautiful fall red.

Black raspberries are also plentiful here.

I’ve never seen so many winterberries growing in a single place before and every bush was loaded with fruit. Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) is a native plant in the holly family and is toxic, but birds love the berries. This plant loves wet feet so if you find it you can almost always be sure there is water nearby. Native Americans used many parts of it medicinally but they knew how to prepare it so it would cure and not make them sick.

I saw many spruce trees here and that immediately told me something about this place was different, because I don’t see many spruce trees in the wild. Spruce trees like it cool and they prefer the boreal forests further north. There are at least two species here and I think they were probably red spruce (Picea rubens) and black spruce (Picea mariana.) Neither one minds boggy ground.

Cattails (Typha latifolia) were an important food for Native Americans. Their roots contain more starch than potatoes and more protein than rice, and native peoples made flour from them.  They also ate the new shoots in spring, which must have been especially welcome after a long winter of eating dried foods. They are very beneficial to many animals and birds and even the swamps, ponds and lakes they grow in by filtering runoff water and helping reduce the amount of silt and nutrients that flow into them.

Before the new middle school could be built here an archaeological sensitivity assessment had to be done, and by the time the dig was completed it was found that Native Americans lived here at the end of the last ice age, approximately 11,000-12,000 years ago. The dig also found that the Ashuelot River once ran through here; about a half mile east of where it now flows. Since the site evolved into a swamp it was never farmed or built on so it was valuable enough archeologically to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. There are a few diagrams like the one above placed here and there on the boardwalk to help people understand exactly what went on here 12,000 years ago.

I thought this was interesting.

500 acres of swamp boggles my mind and I know that if I hopped off the boardwalk and bush whacked my way into the swamp, I’d probably be lost in under an hour. Once you get turned around and start wandering in circles it’s all over, and in November of 1890 that’s exactly what happened to George McCurdy, who died of exposure. I’ve heard stories about another man who went into the swamp and was never found. I’ll stay on the boardwalk but the swamp is very enticing and I’d love to explore it.

There are lots of birds in the swamp and benches are placed here and there along the boardwalk for people who like to sit and watch them.

It’s not hard to find evidence of woodpeckers here. This hole was made by a pileated woodpecker sometime in the past.

This hole was fresh and was probably made by one of the smaller woodpeckers, like the downy woodpecker.

There are lots of cinnamon ferns (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) growing in the swamp. They like wet feet and I usually find them near water. The common name for this fern comes from its upright reddish brown fertile fronds which someone thought looked like cinnamon sticks. It often turns bright pumpkin orange in the fall.

There were many fallen leaves on the boardwalk.

The fallen leaves made me look up, and when I did I was surprised to see bare branches on some of the maples already. Fall must pass quickly here.

A black birch (Betula lenta) showed how beautiful it could be. This tree is also called sweet birch and its numbers were once decimated because of its use as a source of oil of wintergreen. The bark looks a lot like cherry bark but chewing a twig is the best way to identify it; if it tastes like wintergreen then it is black birch. If not then it is most likely a cherry.

Royal fern (Osmunda spectabilis) has a strong presence here and this one was very beautiful in its fall colors. Royal fern is one of the most beautiful of our native ferns in my opinion, but often fools people by not really looking very fern like. Royal fern is in the family Osmundaceae, and fossils belonging to this family have been found in rocks of the Permian age, which was about 230 million years ago. There is also a European species of royal fern called Osmunda regalis.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. ~Henry David Thoreau

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More Fall Color

Fall came early this year I think, but for what must be the first time I’m noticing how dependent on temperature and weather the foliage colors are. We had some quite cool nights a week or two ago and that started things off but then it got hot again; it was 80 degrees and humid on the day of this writing, and the foliage changes seem to have slowed. This view of the Ashuelot River north of Keene in Gilsum is bright enough but other than a spot of yellow or orange I think it’s mostly made up of varying shades of green. But since I’m colorblind I’m the last person you should choose to believe when it comes to color. I’ll let you make your own decisions.

One thing I’m sure of by these photos is how little water is actually in the river bed. Normally I would have been very foolish to try to stand where I was when I took this one but it’s been so dry there was nothing to worry about on this day. They say we’ve had the 18th driest September since records have been kept over the last 150 years.

Something that struck me as odd and interesting was this dog lichen, which was growing on a stone that is submerged for at least a few months in spring. I’ve seen mosses stand it but this is the first lichen I’ve seen put up with being underwater. But they do love water; evidenced by their color changes and their increased pliability after a rain.

This is another scene along the Ashuelot River in the northern part of Keene. There wasn’t really more water in this part of the river, just fewer rocks.

Sometimes highbush blueberries will take on a plum color in the fall as this one has and sometimes they’re bright red.

An ash tree burned brightly at the edge of the woods. Ash trees are among the first to turn and you can often see green hillsides with spots of bright yellow here and there.

And this young ash turned a beautiful deep purple. This is a white ash (Fraxinus americana,) I believe.

One of the scenes I look forward to each fall is this one, where birches grow out of the bedrock.

Many ferns are putting on their fall colors and one of the prettiest is the cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum.) 

And a forest full of them is even prettier.

Another plum colored blueberry with a yellow maple caught my eye on the way to work one morning.

I actually learned the secret of photographing purple grasses from taking photos of purple love grass (Eragrostis spectabilis.) As a nature photographer you never stop learning, and nature itself is often the best teacher. You try and try and then try again, and eventually you hit on the right light, or the right background, or the right perspective and then finally you have it, and then you can show the plant or any other bit of nature at its best. In my line of thought, this is how you get people interested enough to want to get out there and see nature for themselves; by showing it at its most beautiful. This beautiful little shin-high grass grows on sandy roadsides and flowers in late summer and early fall. Its purple flower heads will eventually turn a tannish color and break off. They are often seen rolling and floating along the roadsides like tumbleweeds in the fall.

Here is a closer look at purple love grass. It’s very pretty and I’m lucky enough to see quite a lot of it along roadsides.

Bittersweet nightshade (Solanum dulcamara) also chose to wear purple for fall. Pretty, but it contains solanine, which is the same toxic substance found in many members of the nightshade family including deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna.)

Virginia creeper vines (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) are beautiful this year.

Red leaves and blue berries on pink stems make Virginia creeper really stand out in the fall, and sometimes whole trees are draped in it.

Winterberries, one of our native hollies, also ripen in the fall and if the birds don’t eat them they’ll persist well into winter. Photos of winterberries with snow on them have become so common they have become almost a cliché, like raindrops on roses. Still snow on these berries is a relatively difficult shot, only because you have to be in the right place at the right time. Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) is toxic, but birds snap up the berries fairly quickly after they’ve been in the cold for a while. This plant loves wet feet so if you find it you can almost always be sure there is water nearby. Native Americans used many parts of it medicinally but they knew how to prepare it so it would cure and not make them sick.

There must be many millions of acorns falling this year; I would guess enough to call it a mast year. In a mast year the trees grow a bumper crop and produce much more fruit than in a non-mast year. Scientists believe that by sometimes producing huge amounts of seed that at least some will survive being eaten by birds and animals and grow into trees. Having been outside most of my life I can say that many acorns survive intact until spring in a mast year. I’ve spent a good deal of time raking them up.

Native witch hazels (Hamamelis virginiana) often lose their chlorophyll in an odd way. Sometimes in winter you see these leaves wearing a warm, rosy brown which is very beautiful against the snow. 

Red maples (Acer rubrum) aren’t always red in the fall, but they’re almost always unbelievably beautiful and we have many millions of them here in our 4.8 million acres of forest. Over the years I’ve heard  different people say that these tree colors “can’t be real,” and that there must be some kind of camera trick involved, but I’m here to tell you that they are indeed very real and there is no trickery involved. This photo is exactly how it came out of the camera, so if you feel that what you see here is some kind of trick I would suggest that before determining the reality of a thing you might want to experience it for yourself. Many millions of people from every country on earth come here to see the autumn foliage each year. Maybe you should too.

This view of the Ashuelot River in Keene was another that held more varying shades of green than anything else but I thought it was so beautiful and peaceful I had to include it. I hope you think so too, and I really do wish you could experience it for yourselves. At this time of year you can find people who have lived here their entire lives just standing and staring, and I think that’s because when you see something like this for a time you’re taken away to a higher place. I stood and stared for a while myself, forgetting that I was supposed to be taking photos for you.

The first act of awe, when man was struck with the beauty or wonder of nature, was the first spiritual experience. ~Henryk Skolimowski

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More Fall Color

Though we still have a lot of colorful foliage to see we are now just past peak color and leaves (mostly maple) are falling quickly. The birch trees clinging to this rock face still had plenty of their bright yellow leaves though. That beautiful blue color you see is caused by wet spots on the stone that reflected the blue of the sky.

Here is a hillside that’s considerably more populated than the one in the previous photo. Many of the trees were already bare when this was taken and by the time you see this post I’m guessing that the biggest part of this hillside will be bare. It’s amazing how fast it can happen, especially with rain and wind, and that tells me I’d better be climbing a mountain soon if I want to see the colors from above.

If you thought you saw plum purple in that previous photo you might have; white ash trees (Fraxinus americana) often turns purple in the fall.

White ash is also called American ash. Along with purple they’ll turn red, orange or yellow in the fall. They turn early along with the maples and are one of our most beautiful fall trees.

Another hillside with some bare trees. And cows.

The trees along the Branch River in Marlborough were showing some good color. Marlborough was settled in 1764 and before that it was a fort town known as Monadnock number 5. Marlborough grew to be an important quarry town and granite from here was used in buildings in Boston and Worcester Massachusetts. Today slightly over 2,000 people live there and I drive through it every day to and from work.

Up north of Keene in Surry the Ashuelot River can just be glimpsed through the trees. Surry is another small town. With a population of only 732 in 2010 in hasn’t grown much since the first census was taken in 1790. It had 448 residents then. It also has some beautiful fall foliage.

Surry also has Surry Mountain and it had quite a lot color on the day that I was there.

Surry Mountain has a lot of evergreens on it, mostly pine and hemlock, and they and the deciduous trees sometimes grow in wide swaths of one kind or the other without much mixing.

The mountain also had a few bare trees showing. Though they say that fall color was about 10 days later than average this year it seems like the maples aren’t hanging on to their leaves very long once they turn.

Our roadways still have plenty of color along them, either highways or back roads.

And so do our rail trails. This one is in Swanzey but they all look pretty much the same, bordered by a variety of trees. These happened to be maples.

Two ferns turn white quite early on in the fall; lady ferns (Athyrium filix-femina) like the one seen here are often first, and sensitive ferns (Onoclea sensibilis) usually just before a frost. In fact sensitive ferns got that name from early settlers who saw that it was very sensitive to frost and cold weather.

I’ve seen hundreds of royal ferns (Osmunda spectabilis) in the fall and they’ve all been yellow until I saw this one, which decided to be orange. I like it better than yellow but I may never see another one. Royal ferns are thought to live 100 years or more though, so I do have a chance.

There was quite a lot of red showing in Tenant Swamp in Keene. Most of the trees in this view are maples, I think, but there may be a yellow larch or two in there as well.

I took this photo looking into the forest so you could see what the woods look like at this time of year.

One of my favorite places to walk is on this trail around a local pond. On this day the trail was carpeted with newly fallen leaves and the sight, sounds, and smell of them made me 10 years old again. I used to love walking through leaves just like these on the way to school.

Many people don’t realize that certain evergreens lose needles in the fall just as deciduous trees lose their leaves. White pine needles (Pinus strobus) like those seen here first turn yellow and then brown before finally falling. These examples fell in the pond water and made interesting patterns. You can find huge amounts of fallen needles like these along our back roads.  I used to fill trash bags full of them each year for a lady who used them as mulch.

I know everyone likes to see the colors reflected in glass-like water but October is a windy month and undisturbed water is hard to come by. Luckily the pond is protected by a big hill on one side so some parts of it were sheltered from the worst of the wind.

This is about as good as it got for reflections this time around I’m afraid, but there should be more in future posts.

Like being inside a kaleidoscope, that’s what this season is. Here are more of those fallen leaves I used to love walking through so much as a boy. I wish you could smell them. There is nothing else like it.

The fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light ~Malcolm Lowry

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More Fall Color

I had three days off due to the Columbus Day holiday but a heavy cloud cover decided to park itself over the entire region, so most of the photos you’ll see here were taken under gray skies. But this makes things interesting for me, because there is a long running argument that says colors “pop” better on cloudy days than they do on sunny ones. For me it depends. If the sun is behind me and I’m looking at the sun shining on the foliage the scene can be very beautiful, but on cloudy days you don’t have to worry about where the sun is. The colors still “pop” but in a different way, as this view from Howe Reservoir in Dublin shows. Mount Monadnock would have shown in the background if not for the low clouds.

I moved along the shoreline of the reservoir trying to get shots of the best color. An Asian couple did the same, taking selfies with their phones, presumably because the people back home would never believe this. Actually I’ve heard that there are people who think it couldn’t be real; that the colors had to have been faked somehow, but then they came here and found that nature can indeed be pretty colorful.

We still haven’t reached peak color yet so many trees like oak and beech are still green. It seems to start in swaths or pockets throughout the forest before finally the entire forest is ablaze with colors of every hue. I watch the hillsides that surround Keene and when they are showing quite a lot of color that’s my signal to start climbing and try to photograph it from above. So far I haven’t had much luck but I keep trying. My breathing is ragged this year so I’ll probably only get one try. I’ll try to make it a good one.

Birches tend to grow in groves, often mixed in with other species, so it’s hard to isolate a single tree to show you their fall leaf color, but this one conveniently leaned out over the water all by itself. They don’t vary much from the clear yellow that you see here, although I have seen red and orange leaves on birch trees occasionally.

In the fall blueberries come in yellow, orange, red, and the plum color seen here. They grow wild around our lakes and ponds. I can’t think of a single body of fresh water I’ve been on in this state that didn’t have blueberries on its shores. They are very common and their numbers are staggering.

In the last fall color post I showed some cinnamon ferns that were orange. Usually their cousins the interrupted ferns (Osmunda claytoniana) also turn orange but this one at Howe Reservoir was bright yellow.

Sometimes just a single tree seems enough.

But a single tree can never match the beauty of an entire forest wearing its fall colors. The asters were a bonus.

Red maples (Acer rubrum) don’t mind wet feet so they are often found it wet places, and that is why they’re also called swamp maples by many people. In fact some swamps are called red maple swamps. As this view into a swamp shows they come in various shades of yellow, orange, red and are one of our most colorful fall trees. They’re also called soft maple and scarlet maple. These trees can get quite big; the largest known red maple lives in Michigan and is 125 feet tall with a circumference of over 16 feet.

Both main roads and back roads are getting colorful now.  You don’t realize how many people come to see the foliage until you drive a road like this one. Usually you can walk on this road and not see a car all day, but on this day it was like a super highway. I had to wait a while to get a shot with no cars in it.

False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) had colorful leaves but no berries. They get eaten fast and I haven’t been able to find any ripe ones yet this year.

I still haven’t seen any scarlet poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) leaves but I did see some that I thought were pink. Unfortunately my color finding software sees the sky reflected off the leaves and thinks the few leaves in the lower right corner are several shades of blue.

Wild river grape leaves (Vitis riparia) turn yellow in the fall and this is a great time to find them because they stand out better now than at any other time of year.

I couldn’t let a warm and dry fall day go by without visiting the Ashuelot River. I started in the northern part of town and sure enough the tree that always changes before all the others had done it again. I can’t get close to it so I have no idea what it is, but it’s always early.

After visiting the northern part of town I visited town center at Ashuelot Park. This stretch of river is one of my favorites in the fall because the banks are lined with colorful maples. You have to come here relatively early though, because many maples change early and that means they drop their leaves early. In a week or so when I’m at other places admiring colorful foliage the trees here might be all but bare.

The falls over the old Colony dam on West Street turned to molten gold in the afternoon sun.

One of the reasons I love to come here at this time of year is because of the way the afternoon sun sets the trees ablaze with color. It’s beautiful and seeing people just standing and staring or taking photos is common. One girl with a camera told me she comes here every day. It’s a place people come to immerse themselves in the beauty of fall.

But which is more beautiful, the sunlight coming through the trees or falling on the trees? I can never decide so I always get shots of both. The colors are amazing no matter how you look at them.

I’ve been looking at this shot of a turtle on a log for nearly a week now, trying to think of what I wanted to say about it. What a lucky turtle is about all I can come up with. Not profound maybe, but I wouldn’t have minded spending some time on that log myself. I can’t imagine being any more immersed in nature than that.

I meant to do my work today, but a brown bird sang in the apple tree, and a butterfly flitted across the field, and all the leaves were calling. ~Richard le Gallienn

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More Fall Color

Our fall color was off to a good start with a cool end to August but then it got hot, and then it got even hotter until this past week has seen record breaking heat in the 90s F. and tropical humidity. We haven’t had any beneficial rain for a couple of weeks either and all the stones seen in the view of Ashuelot River above show how low the water has gotten. The heat and lack of rainfall seem to have slowed the fall foliage transformation down dramatically but you can see some color along the Ashuelot. The yellow in the tree over on the left isn’t the tree’s color but comes from an Oriental bittersweet vine that has grown up it.

This is what oriental bittersweet can do. What you can’t see is how it wraps itself around the trunk and slowly strangles the tree. The reason I’m showing this is to point out how easy it is to spot this invasive vine at this time of year, and once you’ve spotted it you can eradicate it by cutting it and painting the cut surface with glycophosphate.

This view of the Ashuelot River in north Keene doesn’t show much fall color but it’s a pretty spot that I like visiting at all times of year.

White ash (Fraxinus americana) is one of the first trees to change in the fall and they usually start out bright yellow, but are often multicolored with yellow, orange, red and deep purple all on the same tree.

This photo gives an idea of the range of colors found in white ash trees.

Honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) is another tree that turns early and is bright yellow. I’m guessing that this one is one of the many thornless cultivars developed from our native trees. Native honey locusts are very thorny, with sharp thorns that can be 4 or 5 inches long.

Though this photo doesn’t show a lot of foliage colors it’s another one of my favorite places, and on this day the trail led to some good color. Unseen just off to the left is the Ashuelot River and this trail follows it. The trail has been here for many years; possibly many hundreds of years, and I’ve been following it since I was a boy. Even so I usually see something here that I’ve never noticed before.

Colorblindness can make blogging difficult at times. I could see the red of the leaves on the red maple tree in the center of this photo just fine in person, but I can’t see them in the photo. They just blend into the other colors for me, but I’m including the photo because I know not everyone is colorblind and I think most of you will see those red leaves. At least I hope so.

Colorblindness can also be very subtle. The red maple in this photo I can see just fine, but I can’t tell you why. It’s something you learn to live with but at this time of year I’m never 100% sure of the colors I see. I once drove to a spot where there were some beautiful flaming orange maples, only to find when I got home and got the shot on the computer that my color finding software saw them as yellow green.

Colorblindness isn’t all bad though; colorblind people can often see camouflaged objects clearly and their services are highly valued by the armed forces. Outlines are clearly defined because they aren’t being blurred or muddled by color. I can see a black chanterelle (Craterellus cornucopioides) mushroom on the forest floor with ease even though many mushroom hunters say they are one of the most difficult to find, but if a red cardinal lands in a green tree it disappears instantly. In fact I’ve never seen a cardinal even when they were pointed out, so if the newer readers of this blog were wondering, that’s why you don’t see many birds in these posts. Or cardinal flowers.

I didn’t have any trouble seeing the pumpkin orange of this cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum.) Many ferns are very colorful at this time of year and cinnamon ferns are one of the most beautiful.

For years I’ve said on this blog that lady ferns (Athyrium filix-femina) were the only ones I knew that turned white in fall, but I was forgetting about the sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis,) which often does the same. The above photo is of lady ferns. I haven’t found any white sensitive ferns yet, but they’ll be along.

I found a goldenrod with all of the color washed out of it, which is something I’ve never seen.

This is one of those trees that I saw as orange but fully expected to find out it was green when I got home, so I was happy when my color finding software told me it had orange in it. But it’s a kind of drab orange and some are saying that our fall colors won’t be quite as eye popping as usual this year because of the dryness and the heat. Last year we were in a drought and the colors were still beautiful, but we didn’t have tropical heat and humidity in September. It’s always a guessing game, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Peak color typically happens in mid-October here in the southern part of the state, so stay tuned.

These leaves fell off the tree in the previous photo. It’s amazing how many different colors can be on a maple tree at the same time.

The dogwoods are showing a lot of color this year. This large silky dogwood (Cornus amomum) was a deep maroon and stood out from the surrounding plants like a beacon.

This view of the Branch River in Marlborough is another of my favorites in the fall. Though the color finding software sees a lot of green it also sees red, orange and yellow. And of course the blue of the river. Rivers taught me that if I wanted to have this beautiful blue in a photo of them I had to snap the shutter when the sun was behind me.

Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) has bright yellow leaves in the fall, and this is how they start to turn. Soon they will be full of small blossoms with yellow, strap shaped petals; our last and latest flower to bloom. Though they usually blossom in October during one mild winter I found them still blooming in January. We also had dandelions blooming in January that year.

Staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) are showing some great color this year, starting out in shades of orange before finally turning several shades of red. Red can be a very hard color to photograph and cameras don’t seem to like it but this appears to be an accurate shot of what I saw.

Crimson is just one of the several shades of red you can see on a staghorn sumac.

Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) is another plant that turns several shades of red but will also occasionally become deep purple. My mother loved this native vine so much that she planted it beside our porch before she died. It grew big enough to provide cool shade in summer and bright color in fall, and it is included in my earliest memories.

Friends of mine have a huge Virginia creeper growing up a tree near their house that has more berries on it than any Virginia creeper I’ve seen, but it refuses to turn red so this will have to do for now. The berries are poisonous to humans but many birds eat them, including thrushes, woodpeckers, warblers, vireos, mockingbirds, turkeys, and chickadees. Mice, red fox, skunks, chipmunks, squirrels and deer also like them so there is plenty of competition for the fruit. I’ve read that birds are more attracted to red berries than the blue-black berries of Virginia creeper, so the vine compensates by having red leaves and stems in the fall. When the birds land amidst all the red hues they find and eat the berries.  Since thirty five species of birds eat them it must be a successful ploy.

I found this Virginia creeper in a shaded part of the forest. I don’t know if it was ever red, but it was white and pale green when I saw it and I wanted to show it here so you could see how very different the same plants can appear in the fall. Sometimes it takes me a minute or two to figure out exactly what it is I’m seeing.

The New Hampshire bureau of tourism estimates that ten million people will come to see the fall foliage this year and I hope that each and every one of them will be able to see scenes like this one that I saw early one recent morning in Hancock. If you can’t make it to New Hampshire this year I hope you’ll have plenty of colorful foliage to see in your own area.

Why is it that so many of us persist in thinking that autumn is a sad season? Nature has merely fallen asleep, and her dreams must be beautiful if we are to judge by her countenance. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Fall in New Hampshire

Each year millions of people come here from all over the world to see the fall colors. This post is for those of you who can’t make it.

 

Slowly, the colors of fall creep from the forest floor to the understory and finally to the trees. The trees in the lowlands near rivers and streams seem to change first and then the colors move slowly uphill.

 

It doesn’t matter what road or trail you choose to travel at this time of year because they are all lined with colorful trees, and this year they seem even more colorful than they usually do.

Late one afternoon I was following the river and came upon this grove of orange ferns. Our apple crop ripened three weeks early this year and the fall colors seem to be early as well.

 

Along the Ashuelot River the late afternoon sun made the trees look like they were on fire.

 

A drift of reindeer lichens almost looks like a stream through the woods. Though these lichens look white in the photo they are actually a light, silvery gray.

 

If you have the same kind of colorblindness that I have then you probably can’t see the large red tree on the right. I know it’s there because I could see it in person, but for some reason I can’t see it in this photo.

 

Another view of another pond ringed by colorful trees.

This view doesn’t have much fall color but I like it because it is one of the few almost treeless views that I know of.

 

Sometimes a ray of sunlight falls on a single tree and you just have to get a picture of it, even when you’ve seen it happen a thousand times before.

The setting sun shining through maples along the river turned everything pumpkin orange.

The Otter and Minnewawa brooks join together to form the Branch River in Marlborogh, New Hampshire. There is some nice color along its short length.

Deep shadows made this rock face look bluish gray, which I thought was the perfect contrast for these orange leaves.

This is another view of the Branch River in Marlborough, New Hampshire.

One evening the setting sun was doing some amazing things to the clouds over the wetlands.

Autumn … painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under harvest skies. ~Sharon Kay Penman

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