Things I’ve Seen

According to statistics November is on average the cloudiest month in this part of the country, but as you can see by the above photo not every day is totally cloudy. This was one of those blue sky, white puffy cloud days and I took this photo because of the clouds. That lower one was growing quickly and I thought it might become a thunderhead, but it never did. It just got bigger.

Many of the photos in this post were taken before the snowstorm I showed in the last post. Snow or not I won’t be seeing anymore fleabane flowers for a few months now. It’s just too cold now for flowers.

November can be a very cold month, when we start to really realize that winter is right around the corner. Frost on the windows helps remind us of that, and I caught this frost crystal growing on my car winshield. They’re beautiful things that most of us pay no attention to.

Ponds are starting to freeze up as well. Bright sunshine has little real warmth in November unless it is coupled with a southerly breeze.

I went to the river to see if any ice baubles had formed along the shore but I got sidetracked for a bit by the beautiful light.

I’ve never seen this stretch of water look gold and blue like it did on this morning.

It was like seeing molten light. None of these colors have been enhanced by me. Nature did all the enhancing.

And on another, colder day, there were ice baubles growing along the shore. If you’ve ever made a candle, you know that you dip the wick in hot wax over and over again, letting the wax harden between dips. If you think of the twigs as wicks, you can see how every wave crest “dips” the twigs in water and the cold air hardens that water into ice. Over time, ice baubles like those seen here form.

Twigs aren’t the only thing that the ice forms on. Anything that the water splashes on over and over will ice up.

The ice baubles are usually as clear as blown glass but on this day a lot of them had air bubbles trapped inside. Many of these examples were nearly round as well but they’re often more pear shaped. Along a river or stream is the only place I’ve ever seen them form in this way, though I suppose they could form anywhere where there is splashing water in winter.

On shore, the sun lit up an oak leaf beautifully.

Some of the biggest oak leaves I’ve ever seen belong to the swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor.) This is a rare species in the woods here but in 2010 the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services removed a 250-year-old timber crib dam in this section of river, and when they replanted the river banks, they chose swamp white oak as one of the tree species. Though the trees are barely 10 feet tall this leaf must have been 8 inches long. Brown is the fall color for the leaves of this oak. The New Hampshire state record for the largest swamp white oak is held by a tree in Swanzey. It is 67 feet tall and has a circumference of 192 inches. That’s 16 feet, so I’m not sure if even 4 people could link hands around a tree that size.

One characteristic of swamp white oak is peeling bark on its branches, giving it a ragged look. On young trees like these even the bark of the trunk will peel, as it was on this example. Planting this species of tree here makes sense because it is tolerant of a variety of soil conditions and can stand drought or flood. The only thing they can’t bear is beavers, and these critters have cut down and hauled off many of them.

When I was taking photos of this tree’s branches I looked down and sure enough, beavers had been at its bark. This tree is a goner, I’m afraid. It has been girdled.

At this time of year, when the soil starts to freeze but before any snow falls, you can often hear the soil crunch when you walk on it. That’s the signal that you should get down on your hands and knees and peer down into those tiny frozen canyons. If you do you’re liable to find ice needles there, because the crunching you heard was probably them breaking. Several things have to happen before needle ice can form. First there has to be groundwater. Next, the air temperature has to fall below 32 degrees F right at the soil surface while the soil and groundwater remain thawed. Hydrostatic pressure forces the groundwater, sometimes super cooled, out of the soil where it freezes instantly into a “needle.” As more water is forced out of the soil the process is repeated over and over, and each needle grows in length because of more water freezing at its base. I’ve read that each thin needle is hexagonal in shape, and that needles have been found that were 16 inches long. The needles in these photos were 1-3 inches long I’d guess, and they were frozen into ribbons. They’re another of those gems of nature that many never see.

Puddle ice has been a friend of mine for a very long time. When I was a boy, after the snow melted in spring, I’d get my bike out and ride it to school. It was still cold enough for ice to form on the puddles and I used to think it was great fun to ride through them so I could hear the strange tinkling / crinkling sounds that the breaking ice made. I have since found out that the whiter the ice, the more oxygen was present in the water when it formed. These days instead of breaking the ice I look for things in it. This time I thought I saw a penguin in that curvy shape to the right of center.

I saw a pair of mallards but this is the only shot that came out useable. I thought this was unusual because usually one will tip up while the other stands guard and watches.

An oriental bittersweet vine had reached the top of a small tree and many of its berries had fallen into a bird’s nest, built where the branches met underneath the bittersweet. Birds love these berries but I think the bird that built this nest must be long gone for warmer climes. These vines are terribly invasive so the fewer berries eaten by birds, the better.

The birds have been eating the river grapes, finally.

They have plenty to eat. It has been an exceptional year for grapes and many other plants.

I love that shade of blue on juniper berries. A waxy coating called bloom reflects the light in a way that makes them that color. I always wonder how many gin drinkers know that the unique flavor in their drink comes from this plant’s fruits. Though they’re called berries, botanically speaking juniper fruits are actually fleshy seed cones. Unripe green berries are used to flavor gin and the ripe, deep purple-black berries are the only part of a conifer known to be used as a spice, often used on game like venison, moose and bear meat. Birds also love them so they won’t last long.

The winterberries (Ilex verticillata) are covered with berries this year. This native holly holds its berries through the winter and they look great against the white snow. They have a very low-fat content and birds won’t eat them until other fruits with higher fat contents have been eaten. Other plants that fruit in the fall like maple leaf viburnum, high bush cranberry, and staghorn sumac also produce fruit that is low in fat content. That’s why you often see these plants with the previous season’s berries still on them in the spring. Due to the light of the day all three cameras I carried had a hard time with these berries but I wasn’t surprised because red is one of the hardest colors for a camera to capture.

I found a very old hemlock log. The branches had been cut off long ago but the stubs that were left were amazing in their texture. It was if someone had carved them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before.

Orange fan shaped jelly fungi (Dacryopinax spathularia) grew on the dark end of a log and looked like tiny lights. Actually they were more nose shaped than spatula shaped but I’ve found that fungi don’t always live up to what they were named. In the winter they’re a pretty spot of color in a white world.

But for color in winter turkey tails (Trametes versicolor) have to take the prize. These examples were beautiful, and they wore my favorite turkey tail color combinations.

I saw this foreboding sky at dawn one morning. I thought it was beautiful and I hope you’ll think so too.

In a few blinks you can almost see the winter fairies moving in
But first, you hear the crackle of their wings. ~Vera Nazarian

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By A Pond

I was going to walk a rail trail in Swanzey one day but as I pulled off the road to park I saw a small pond. Though I’ve seen it many times before it wasn’t until this day that it caught my interest. I started to explore its shores and before I knew it I had a camera full of photos and never did walk the rail trail. Normally this wouldn’t be anything remarkable but the pond is one step above a puddle, so if you put a canoe in it you’d be lucky if you had one stroke of the paddle before you had crossed it.

The unexplored rail trail will still be there for another day; maybe a sunnier one.

Barbed wire was used in this area in place of the heavy gauge stock fencing that the railroad usually used to keep cows and other animals off the tracks. You have to watch where you’re going in these New Hampshire woods because there are still miles of barbed wire out there and it’s easy to get hung up on.

A culvert lets the small stream that feeds the pond flow under the road.

An outflow stream runs into the drainage ditches along the rail bed, ensuring that the pond is always balanced and never floods.

This 3 part seed pod told me that I can come here in the spring to find the sessile leaved bellwort plant (Uvularia sessilifolia.) The flowers are pale yellow, more or less tubular, and nodding, and often grow in large colonies. The plant is also called wild oats or merry bells. In botany sessile means “resting on the surface” so in the case of sessile leaved bellwort the leave are stalkless and appear to be resting on the surface of the stem.  Since the plant is so good at spreading by underground stems (stolons) it doesn’t often set seed.

Sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis) likes to grow in places that are on the wet side and seeing its clusters of spore bearing sori is a good indication of a wetland.  It is also called bead fern, for obvious reasons. The name sensitive fern comes from its sensitivity to frost, which was first noticed by the early colonials.

Another wetland indicator appeared in the form of winterberries (Ilex verticillata.) I often see this native holly growing in standing water but I’ve heard that it will grow in drier soil. Birds love its bright red berries. These shrubs are dioecious, meaning they need both a male and female plant present to produce seed. If you have a yard with wet spots winterberry is a great, easy to grow native plant that won’t mind wet feet.

Black jelly fungi (Exidia glandulosa) grew on a fallen oak limb. They were a bit dry and had lost some of their volume but they hadn’t shriveled down to the black flakes they could have been. I like their shiny surfaces; sometimes it’s almost as if they had been faceted and polished like a beautiful black gem.

I think that this is what was left of a thin maze flat polypore (Daedaleopsis confragosa) but it was hard to tell because its entire upper surface was missing so I could see its gills from above. I’m assuming that it was slowly decomposing from age but I can’t be sure because I’ve never seen another bracket fungus do this. Normally the upper surface of a thin maze flat polypore would be zoned like a turkey tail, but the zones would tend to be tan to brown to cream, rather than brightly colored like a turkey tail.

The lower pore bearing surface of the thin maze flat polypore is maze like, as its name suggests. Michael Kuo of Mushroom Expert. com says that this mushroom’s appearance is highly variable, with pores sometimes appearing elongated and sometimes more round. I put my camera against the tree’s trunk under the fungus and snapped this photo without seeing what I was taking a photo of, so it isn’t one of the best I’ve ever done. It does show you the maze-like structure of this fungus though, and that’s the point.

From a photographic perspective the example above is terrible, but it shows just what I want you to see. These foliose lichens were growing in the white pine branches just over my head, and all I had to do to find them was look up and see their silhouette. If you’d like to find them all you need to do is look up the next time you’re under a tree.

If you see a foliose lichen on a branch and pull it down for a look like I did you might see something similar to the northern camouflage lichen seen (Melanelia septentrionalis) above. Foliose means leaf or foliage like, and this lichen is a beautiful example of that.

The shiny reddish brown discs are apothecia or fruiting bodies, and they help identify this lichen. The stringy black parts are the lichen’s root like structures called rhizines, and they also help identify the lichen. The body (thallus) was very dry and its color had faded from brown to the off whitish gray color seen here. I usually find these on pine or birch limbs.

Note: Canadian Botanist Arold Lavoie tells me that this lichen is in the Tuckermannopsis ciliata group. I’m sorry if my misidentification has caused any confusion. Arold has helped me here before and I’m very grateful. If you’d like to pay him a visit his website can be found at http:www.aroldlavoie.com

Just to the right of center in the above photo is a maple dust lichen (Lecanora thysanophora) on the bark of a maple. It was about the size of a dime, or .70 inches (17.9 mm.)

It was a few years ago now that I stumbled onto my first maple dust lichen and though I kept it in the front of my mind I never saw another example until just recently. Now I’m suddenly seeing them everywhere. It’s hard for me to believe but I must have been looking right at them and not seeing them for years. From a distance they resemble script lichens, so maybe that’s why. They’re a beautiful lichen and definitely worth looking for. They can be identified in part by the tiny fringe around their perimeter.

Of all the things I saw near the pond this moss on a log was my favorite because of its beautiful green color and because it was so full of life. It seemed as if it was sparkling from the light of creation coursing through its trailing arms and I could have sat there with it all day. When the log was a tree a woodpecker might have made the hole that the moss explored. I could see part of an acorn in there, so maybe the woodpecker that made the hole hid the acorn in it for a future meal. I think this moss might be beaked comb moss (Rhynchostegium serrulatum) but I’m not certain. I see it quite often on logs but never quite so full of life as this one was. Even in a photo it glows.

American hazelnut (Corylus americana) catkins told me that I could come here in April and see the tiny crimson female flowers. The catkins are the male flowers and once they begin to open and shed yellowish green pollen that will be the signal that it’s time to watch for the opening of the female flowers. They are among the smallest flowers that I know of and are hard to get a good photo of, but I try each spring because they’re also among the most beautiful.

Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn’t mean to take. ~Angela N. Blount

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Cold Winds Are Blowing

 

I found myself in a pocket of beech trees one day and took a few photos. Beech and oak and a few shrubs are all we have for colorful foliage now. 

American beeches (Fagus grandifolia) have great fall color that starts when maples, birches, and others are finishing.

 

Beech colors don’t last long though, and before you know it the leaves turn brown and curl. Like some oak leaves most beech leaves will stay on the younger trees through winter, rattling in the wind. Some believe that the beech hangs onto its dry leaves to hide its young buds from browsing animals.

 

Some shrubs still have good color too, like these burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) that grow in great long swaths along the river. They’re beautiful, but also one of the most invasive shrubs in the state. They grow in such impenetrable thickets that native plants can’t get a start. Another name for this one is winged euonymus and you are not allowed to sell it, import it into, or plant it in New Hampshire.

This is what makes the burning bush so invasive. Birds love its fruit and spread it far and wide. Introduced in the United States from Asia in 1860 as a garden ornamental, it is now present in 25 states and parts of Canada.

 

Another invasive plant is Chinese Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus.), It is a vine so tough that it can strangle young trees and topple older ones by growing in and adding a lot of weight to their crowns. Burning bushes and Chinese bittersweet are in the same family and both are very invasive. The bittersweet was introduced in 1879 and has made it as far west as the Rocky Mountains, as far south as Louisiana, and north to Maine. There is an American species of bittersweet (Celastrus scandens ) and the two plants hybridize naturally, making eradication close to impossible.

 

Usually deer will come along and chomp the entire head of berries from a Jack in the pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum ) stem, but in this case it looks like both the deer and birds have shunned these examples. They look a little deformed so maybe the birds and animals know something about them that I don’t. A similar plant, also in the arum family, is called lords and ladies in the U.K.

Our native holly that is called winterberry (Ilex verticillata) looks nothing like the evergreen hollies we grow in our gardens. In fact for most of the year it is unremarkable and if you weren’t looking for it you wouldn’t pay any attention to it. Even its tiny flowers are hard to see, but in autumn after the leaves have fallen this plant announces its presence with a loud, red berried shout.  Birds don’t eat these berries until very late in winter because they have a low fat content, so many people cut the branches and bring them inside for the holidays. I like to see them against the snowy background.

 

We’ve had both frosts and freezes here now so I took my camera out one icy morning to gather the evidence.

Actually, the evidence of frosts and freezes is everywhere you look, as this contorted fern frond shows.

This helianthus didn’t even have time to drop its petals before being flash frozen.

One frosty morning even though the Ashuelot River was steaming it still looked dark and cold. It won’t be long before ice forms along its shores and slowly creeps toward its middle.

If months were marked by colors, November in New England would be colored gray. ~Madeleine M. Kunin

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