Things I’ve Seen

Evergreen Christmas ferns (Polystichum acrostichoides) have just come up and this is one of the spring fiddleheads that I must have never paid attention to, because I was surprised to see it covered with silver hairs. I think its spiral shape is beautiful but it’s also common; spirals are used over and over in nature. Prehistoric people carved spirals into the walls of their caves and we have tiny spirals in our ears. Snail shells grow in spirals, millipedes curl into spirals, sunflower florets, grape tendrils and even entire galaxies are spirals. And no one knows why.

Spotted salamanders are burrowing creatures that spend much of their lives in burrows or under leaf litter, coming out only to eat and mate. I happened to be doing some digging at work and uncovered the salamander in the above photo. They like rainy weather in the spring, so they must be very pleased with this month so far. I left this one alone and it burrowed right back into the soil after a few moments.

It’s nice to see the chipmunks again. They’re very curious little creatures and will often follow along as you walk wooded trails. They live in stone walls when they can and when they hear you they’ll often come out of their burrows to see what you’re doing. That’s just what this one was doing when I took his photo. He sat there until I started walking and then hopped from rock to rock following me.

Fungi have started to make an appearance and the first I’ve seen is this brain fungus (Gyromitra esculenta) which is a false morel that often grows very near true morels. This is a problem because false morels can be toxic and true morels are not, so if you are a mushroom forager you’ll want to know each one well. An easy way to tell them apart is by the way the cap attaches to the stem. The brain fungus cap attaches only at the top of the stem, and a morel’s cap attaches to the stem over its full length. Cutting one in half lengthwise will tell the story. The brain fungus gets its common name from its reddish brown cap that resembles a brain.

White pines (Pinus strobus) seem to be doing well this year, showing plenty of new growth. The buds seen in this photo are called candles and will grow on to become new branches and needles. White pines are very common native trees here in New Hampshire. There are records of early colonial settlements being entirely wiped out by scurvy before Native Americans showed the settlers how to make tea from white pine needles. They are one of the richest sources of vitamin C found in nature. Native Americans used all parts of the tree and were said to value pines above any other plant.

Flowers usually appear just as leaf buds break but before the leaves fully develop on green ash trees (Fraxinus pennsylvanica.)  I think the ones shown here are male, because they are typically shorter and less showy than the female flowers. They have a tubular calyx and 2 stamens and are often purple tipped as those in the photo. Ash trees are sensitive to pollution, so seeing them is a good sign of clean air.

I’ve already shown photos of female box elder (Acer negundo) flowers recently but I turned a corner and there they were, hanging at eye level. I didn’t mind because I think the sticky lime green pistils are beautiful. One of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen was a box elder growing on the banks of the Connecticut River and that was odd because they’re considered a relatively short lived tree.

As I become more familiar with sedges I’m seeing more and more of them. I found the one in the above photo near a local pond. The male flowers are the creamy yellow parts at the top and the female flowers are the wispy white filaments along the bottom. The female flowers bloom first to catch pollen from other plants and then a few days later the male flowers start to shed pollen so the wind can take it to another plant. This ensures cross pollination and guards against self-fertilization. Sedges look like course tufts of grass but the flower stalks are triangular instead of round, and this leads to the old saying “sedges have edges.” They are gaining popularity as garden plants and some even use them in place of a lawn. I haven’t been able to identify this one yet.

Tent caterpillars were just leaving their nest when I happened along. The moth that laid the eggs on this tree was a species of moth in the family Lasiocampidae, which lays its eggs almost always on plants in the rose family, like cherry and apple trees. The eggs hatch just as the new buds appear on the tree and the caterpillars feed three times each day, just before dawn, at midafternoon, and in the evening after sunset. Cherry leaves contain toxic compounds that the caterpillars absorb so most birds won’t touch them, and that’s the reason for their great success. They can defoliate a tree and this will weaken it, because without leaves it can’t make the food it needs. Most trees will recover, but they won’t look too good while they do.  People often confuse tent caterpillars with fall webworms, but fall webworms don’t cause any real damage because the trees they appear on have usually stopped photosynthesizing and no longer needs the leaves that the caterpillars eat.

I noticed that this ladybug on a beech bud had a large black spot on the rear of its shell that looked like damage. I tried to find information on ladybug diseases but didn’t have much luck.

Here’s another look at the damaged ladybug. Not only did its shell have a black spot, it looked like it had been dented as well. Ladybugs eat many insects that can damage plants so I hope there aren’t any diseases spreading among them. Maybe a bird caused the damage. Whatever it was didn’t seem to hinder its movement; it crawled along the beech bud as if the wind were at its back. When it reached the very tip it turned and went back just as quickly, and I wondered if what was damaged was its sense of direction.

The reason I found the ladybug was because I was in the woods looking for one of the most beautiful signs of spring. Angel wings are what newly unfurled beech leaves (Fagus grandifolia) remind me of, with their fringe of soft silvery, downy hairs. Each spring I check the buds once or twice a week to see if the typically arrow straight buds are curling, because that’s the sign that they’ll open before long.  After they’ve started to curl they’ll also start to swell up, and that’s when I start checking them every other day. This beauty happens quickly and is easily missed.

Beech (and other tree) bud curling is caused by the cells on the sunny side of the bud growing faster than those on the shaded side. This creates a tension that curls the bud and eventually causes the bud scales to pull apart so the leaves can emerge. At the bud’s location on the tree branch an entire year’s new leaves and stems will often grow from a single bud, as can be seen in the above photo. It’s incredible to think that all of that growth came from a single bud in just a matter of days.

Oak leaves are usually one of the last to appear, so I was surprised to see these new leaves. The weather is fooling us all I think, but it’s a great opportunity to see what in nature is triggered by warmth and what is triggered by day length.

The woods are full of beautiful things that you’ve never seen and won’t ever imagine and I hope you’ll have a chance to go and see them for yourself.  As I’ve said here before; I can’t tell you what you’ll see but I can guarantee that you’ll never regret seeing it.

Some of the best advice you will ever hear will come from the forest. ~Dacha Avelin

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Indian Summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Things I’ve Seen

This milkweed tussock moth caterpillar (Euchaetes egle) and several of his friends were busy eating a milkweed plant one day on the river bank. They, like the more familiar monarch butterfly caterpillars, advertise the toxicity they get from the milkweeds with black, white and yellow colors and birds leave them alone. They were feeding on top of the leaves, right out in the open.

 

One day I saw this grass growing by a pond. I’ve never seen another grass with a dark purple seed head like this and I haven’t been able to identify it.

I wonder if the aphid just above the head of this ladybug knew that he was on the menu.

I was wishing the ladybug was in my pocket when I saw all of these aphids on a swamp milkweed pod. I’m hoping I can collect some seeds from them this year but that won’t happen if aphids suck all the life out of the plants.

 

This little butterfly led me down an interesting path recently. I saw a flash of blue wings and followed it around until it let me take some photos. Then when it came time to identify it I convinced myself that it was a Karner blue butterfly (Lycaeides melissa samuelis,) which is endangered and protected under federal law, and which you can go to jail for chasing.  After I caught my breath I took a closer look and noticed the little “tails” coming from the hind wings. They are one of the things that separate the Eastern tailed blue butterfly (Cupido comyntas) from the Karner blue so I was safe, but that was close!

I couldn’t get a shot of the eastern tailed blue butterfly with its wings open but I did find this excellent photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson on Wikipedia so you could see the same beautiful wing color that I saw. Just in case anyone reading this might be wondering, I’ve sworn off chasing blue butterflies.

I didn’t have to chase this brown butterfly. It just sat there and let me take as many photos as I wanted when its wings were closed, but every time I tried to get a shot with the wings open it closed them. I still wonder if it was reading my mind. At first I thought it was a common wood nymph (Cercyonis pegala) but now I’m not so sure. It had large spots on its upper wings.

At one point I thought this was a meadow brown butterfly (Maniola jurtina), but then I decided it was a small heath butterfly (Coenonympha pamphilu.) Now I’m not sure if it’s either one, and you’re finding out why I do plants and not butterflies.

NOTE: Josh Fecteau from the Josh’s Jounal blog has identified this one as a Common Ringlet (Coenonympha tullia). Thanks Josh!

 

Virgin’s bower vines (Clematis virginiana) are slowly going to seed.

The hips of the Alberta wild rose (Rosa acicularis) are the only ones I know that have prickles. I’ve never seen them on rugosa rose hips. I’m not sure what the white liquid that looks like latex could be.

This is the only cauliflower mushroom (Sparassis spathulata) that I’ve seen but I don’t know how I’ve missed them all of these years, because they’re big. This one was the size of a soccer ball. It has a strange growth habit that looks to me like a big ball of cooked egg noodles and in fact, people who eat them use them in place of egg noodles in dishes like beef stroganoff. They are said to grow on the roots of hardwoods but this one was under an eastern hemlock.

These butter wax cap (Hygrocybe ceracea) mushrooms growing on a twig were very small and I wasn’t sure if I could even get a photo of them.  The biggest might have been a little over a quarter inch tall with a cap half the diameter of a pea. The smaller ones looked like yellow dots.

 

Here’s one for all of you mystery lovers out there. These string-like fungi (?) were on the vertical face of a rotting log but they didn’t look like they were growing out of it. They looked more like they had been placed there. It was hard to tell how long they were but it must have been at least 3-4 inches and their diameter was just about the same as a piece of cooked spaghetti. I’ve never seen anything like them.

 

Here’s a closer look at the mystery whatever they are. They appeared to be very fragile because two or three of them were broken into pieces. Were they even alive? I’ve looked through all of my mushroom books and spent considerable time on line trying to identify them but haven’t had any luck. If you know what they are or if you’ve ever seen anything like them I’d like to hear from you.

This one was not a mystery. I’ve seen chicken of the woods before (Laetiporus sulphureus,) but never one as colorful as these. All of those I’ve seen in the past were plain sulfur yellow without the orange, and that’s why another common name for them is sulfur shelf. I’ve read that as they age they lose the orange color, so these examples must have been very young. 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 was able to see them. I sat on the log beside these mushrooms for a while, admiring them. They were beautiful things, bigger than my hand.

Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise. ~Alfred North Whitehead

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