First Frost

It got cold here last week; down into the 20s F at night, so I thought I’d go to the river and see if any ice baubles had formed overnight. It must not have gotten cold enough though, because I didn’t see any ice baubles. I did see plenty of beauty though, including the way that the early morning light played on the water of the river. The water was like liquid silk and so very beautiful; I could have watched it all day.

Before I go too far I should explain what ice baubles are for newer readers. The easiest way to explain them is to think of a candle. You dip the wick in hot wax over and over again, letting the wax harden between dips. If you think of the twigs in this shot from a couple of years ago 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, often overnight, ice baubles like those seen here form. They are very clear and pure and often act like prisms when the sunlight hits them.

If it had been cold enough the lower parts of the aster and other plants here at the water’s edge would have been covered in ice. Even the stones get ice coated so you have to be careful where you step.

But I forgot about the ice when I saw how the sunlight was falling on the ripples. It was electric and mesmerizingly beautiful, as if bands of pure electricity were dancing over the surface of the water. Like the river had somehow captured lightning.

I watched this amazing dancing light for a while and I thought about how we at our essence, are pure energy. I think if someone had come walking along the riverbank and said “I am the light” I would have said “Yes, I can see that. And so are we all.”

The light was so beautiful, everywhere I looked.

Though it was cold enough for gloves and a hat I didn’t really see anything that would signify a freeze. I did see some nice frosty leaves on the mouse ear hawkweeds though. It showed how hairy these leaves are.

Fallen leaves had a bit of frost on them as well but I certainly wouldn’t say we had a “heavy frost.”

Beavers had been busy during the night and had dropped several trees including three or four oaks. These aren’t just any trees; they were bought and planted when the 200 year old timber crib dam was removed from the river at this site in 2010. I don’t know who chose or planted the trees but they really should have hired a botanist. They planted pines so close to the deciduous trees the pines are now shading them out. Since pines grow almost twice as fast as trees like oak, maple and ash, the deciduous trees have never really had a chance to get off to a strong start. Unless the pines are removed the beavers might as well take them.

The evidence left behind by the beavers was easy to find and hard to deny.

There are lots of invasive Japanese barberry bushes here that form a prickly, impenetrable thicket that you can’t walk through; you have to walk around them. They choke out native plants but I’ve noticed that small animals like rabbits like to hide in them, most likely because predators can’t find a way through the thorns.

The birds didn’t get all the grapes. Or maybe they purposely left some behind.

Along with invasive Japanese barberry and Oriental bittersweet, the Asian burning bush is taking over this entire area. It’s a pretty thing that first came over as an ornamental but each plant grows many seeds and the birds love them. The plant is also known as “winged euonymus” and if you look closely at its branches in this shot you can see the corky “wings” that gave it that name.  

I was hoping the burning bushes would have all turned soft pastel pink by this time but there was still a lot of green on them. I’ll have to watch carefully because once it gets cold enough all those leaves can drop off overnight. What you see here is just a small portion of the total number of bushes but this was the first time I’ve seen them from this spot. I would have been chest deep in water in this spot, probably hanging on to a tree, if the river had been high.

And here are the berries that make burning bushes so invasive. Each berry is smaller than a watermelon seed but birds come from all over to eat them.

Most of the clubmosses had let their spores go but this one’s “clubs” had refused to mature, for whatever reason. The clubs are actually called strobili, and are filled with sporangia. These plants are ancient, having been on earth for many thousands of years. They are also called “ground cedar” or “ground pine” but they have nothing to do with pine or cedar. They were once collected almost to extinction by people making Christmas wreaths. If I saw displays of wreaths made of clubmosses I would refuse to buy one, and I would tell the seller why.

Beavers cut the witch hazels every few years and then let them grow back before harvesting them again, but I did find one old enough to have a blossom on it.

A beautiful young beech peeked out from behind a maple.

I was surprised to find a small colony of big leaf asters here. I’ve been coming to this spot for many years and have never seen them here. Colonies of them can get quite large. It would be nice if this one did the same. They have beautiful two foot long sprays of white or sometimes purple flowers. The plants seem to have a habit of suddenly appearing in the least expected places but I find the largest colonies on sunny hillsides.

There are lots of American hornbeam trees here but they die young and don’t reach any great size, possibly due to the flooding that goes on here. Another name for the tree is muscle wood, because someone thought they saw “tendons” rippling underneath the tree’s “skin.” I don’t know if it’s a fact but these trees seem to retain lots of water. I’ve seen them so rotten inside it seemed like the bark was the only thing holding them together. The odd thing about that is how another name for the tree is ironwood, because it is so heavy and strong. I could see many lacy frullania liverworts on this tree’s bark. When it gets cold their color darkens so they’re much easier to see. Most reach to about baseball size.

American Hornbeams have lost their leaves by this time but they’re still easy to identify by their winged seeds, which hang at the end of young branches. The “wing” on each seed (nutlet) is a three lobed bract which catches the wind and takes the seed with it. The bracts and seed coating are light brown when ripe and most should be stripped from the tree by the gusty fall winds at any time now.

Some of the oaks that were planted here are swamp white oaks. In the fall their leaves can be quite colorful.

This view looks downriver and shows a relatively open riverbank there on the left, but it is slowly being taken over by willows, which form a thicket like a wall. They prevent access to the water and that’s too bad, because fishers, swimmers, picnickers, children, and people like myself come here precisely so they can get close to the river. Easy access to the river is the draw; the true value of the place, but town planners can’t seem to see it.

But just the same, the willows are beautiful too. I’ll let nature do what it will and be at peace with it. This area floods each year and over the past four or five years the floods have crept further up the bank to create a river width that I never thought I’d see. I come here in spring each year and the high water mark is always easily seen, often at least a few inches or so higher than it had been the previous year. If it continues to go the way it has been I’m guessing that eventually much of what we’ve seen in this post will simply be washed away. There are already signs of it happening.

I’ll leave you with another look at the beautiful morning light on the water. I hope you enjoyed seeing it as much as I did.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. ~Rumi

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A Fall In The Fall

It isn’t just the trees that make fall so colorful, though you’d never know it by looking at this scene in the wetlands that I travel through. Everything plays a part, including the sky and water; it all just comes together all at once it seems, to make sure there is a beautiful end to the growing season.

I walked along the stream shore and found color everywhere; even in the water.

Here’s a closer look at that scene we saw in the first photo. The trees were mostly red maple but there might have been some American hornbeam and some ash trees mixed in. I’ve seen all three growing in the area. I stood here one day and heard a bird calling, so I looked up and saw an osprey soaring over the trees.

Oaks are just starting to show some color. They have a wide range, from yellow to orange to red and deep purple.

White ash also shows those same colors but this one was deep purple. I also saw one with orange leaves on this day as well. If you can imagine these trees colored this way when they’re 50-75 feet tall you get a good idea of the crazy quilt of colors in our forests.

This royal fern was beautiful, I thought. They often turn yellow in the fall so this one was a surprise.

Bracken ferns were a little less impressive but this one was still pretty in its way. All the various ferns are showing color right now.

Staghorn sumacs are often red like this one and also pumpkin orange this year.

I took this shot of ripe pokeweed berries a while ago but forgot I had taken it. The bright pink and deep purple go well together.

My favorite part of the pokeweed is the “flower” found on the back of each berry. Actually it is called a  calyx but it does reveal what the pokeweed flower once looked like. The berries and all parts of this plant are toxic, but many birds and animals eat the berries. Native Americans used their red juice to decorate their horses and early colonial settlers dyed cloth with it. Some people, especially in the south, eat the spring shoots (called poke salad) despite the fact that the plant contains over one thousand different chemical compounds. Pokeweed is said to be the number one reason for calls to poison control centers.

When the sun shines and it warms up  a bit dragonflies will still appaer. This was a red meadowhawk of some sort. I’ve read that there are many look alikes between red meadowhawks.

I’m seeing lots of shaggy inkcaps lately. As you can see if you look closely these mushrooms liquify, starting at the bottom of the bell shaped cap until the entire body has become a pool of black, ink like liquid. This liquid is full of this mushroom’s spores, and this is its method of spreading them.

I saw a wooly bear caterpillar hurrying across a road. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the wider the brown stripe in the middle of the wooly bear caterpillar is, the milder the winter will be. “Between 1948 and 1956, Dr. C. H. Curran, curator of insects at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, collected these caterpillars and counted the number of brown segments on each. Average brown-segment counts ranged from 5.3 to 5.6 out of the 13-segment total, meaning that the brown band took up more than a third of the woolly bear’s body. As those relatively high numbers suggested, the corresponding winters were milder than average.” The one in the photo has 5-6 brown segments and I believe that means that this particular caterpillar has 5-6 brown segments, and I believe that we will have winter.

“Parachutes,” made of white silk like fibers called floss help milkweed seeds float to new locations. They are commonly seen floating on the breeze at this time of year.

Now that the heat of summer is over dandelions are in bloom again. Odd that I never noticed that they disappeared in summer heat until I statrted doing this blog.

Knapweed is also still blooming sporadically here and there. I’ve also seen many garden plants like small leaved rhododendrons, roses, and even spirea blooming. This is actually a re-bloom for many of them.

Very few flowers show off their beautiful inner light as well as the purple morning glory. This plant is a true morning glory, not a bindweed, and if you let it go to seed in your garden you might be sorry that you ever saw it. It’s a beautiful thing and you can grow it in your garden as long as you’re willing to keep it dead headed so it doesn’t go to seed.

The pink garden turtleheads bloomed beautifully this year so I’m guessing, like their cousins the wild white turtleheads, the garden turtleheads like a lot of water. I’ve see the wild ones actually growing in water.

The turtleheads get their name from their supposed resemblance to a turtle and though my friend Dave saw a turtle before I even told him the name of the plant, I see fish sticking their tongues out.

Usually by this time of year oriental bittersweet has lost all of its leaves but this year they’re hanging on. They’re usually one of the first plants to change color; always a bright, lemon yellow.

And this is how Oriental bittersweet spreads, so if you bring some inside to decorate the holiday table throw it in the trash when the holidays are over, not in the woods. The birds do plenty of that.

When I was a gardener I always got questions about white pine trees at this time of year. People would see yellow needles on them and worry that they were dying but it’s just a naturla part of the process. Pines shed a lot of their oldest, interior needles that don’t see a lot of sunlight at this time of year. They simply don’t need them so they let them go. If they turn yellow and start dropping at other times of year then it might be time to call an arborist.

I had the idea last Friday (10/13) that I’d go over to Stoddard and climb Pitcher Mountain so I could show you some fall color from above. I hadn’t climbed for quite a while due to a clicking knee. It sort of “clicks” when I walk but there isn’t any pain and it hasn’t gotten worse, so off I went. It was a beautiful day.

It was nice to see the meadow again. I like it because it gives me a minimalistic view of life. For a few moments it’s just me, the sky and the earth, but on this day a huge looming cloud came up from the other side of the mountain so there were four. I was hoping I’d see some of the Scottish Highland Cattle that live here but there wasn’t a sign of them.

Up and up I climbed, stopping at this spot and turning around so I could get a shot of Mount Monadnock in the distance and the cloud shadows on the near hills. I’ve loved watching cloud shadows since I was a boy but eventually I climbed on and I was within sight of the summit when I fell. I don’t know what happened but I put my foot on a rock and lifted myself to move forward and suddenly I was falling backward. I think I simply stood up too straight, forgetting to lean into the steep hillside.

When I hit the ground I hit my head on a rock and there was lots of blood that seemed to be coming from everywhere on my scalp, so I shook myself off and headed back down the hillside. I drove to the Stoddard Firehouse but small towns have volunteer firemen so there was nobody there. Next I went to the Mill Village Country Store in Stoddard center. Judging by the looks on the faces I met there I must have been a sight, but the good folks at the store got me a chair, gave me a drink of water, and cleaned me up as best they could. They called one of the firemen, who came and looked me over and said the bleeding had stopped, so I drove myself to the Urgent Care Center in Keene where I had CAT scans and other tests. The verdict was scalp lacerations and concussion. I’ve been walking with a cane now and then as well because I must have also hit my upper left thigh pretty hard on a rock. I don’t know what if any impact this will have on future posts.

I’d like to thank the kind, helpful people at the Mill Village Country Store in Stoddard and the doctors, nurses, and support staff at the urgent care center at Cheshire Hospital in Keene. I might have made it through this without them but it was much more comforting to be in their company. Don’t believe everything you hear and read from the news; this country is still full of good, kind people who will drop everything in an instant to help those in need. Everyday heroes, in my estimation.

The events of the past day have proven to me that I am wholly alive, and that no matter what transpires from here on in, I have truly lived. ~Anonymous

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Industrial Heritage Trail, Keene

As this photo shows, winter has made a comeback. Not only did we get a few inches of snow about a week ago but it turned cold again and has stayed cold, so that means the ice on the wooded trails is still there. They say tomorrow it might reach 55 degrees, so maybe I’ll have some flowers to show you next time. Meanwhile, I chose to walk the Industrial Heritage Trail in Keene. Not only is it paved and regularly plowed, there are some interesting things to see along the way.

This was once a rail bed used by the Cheshire Railroad and then the Boston and Maine Railroad and there are informative signs along the way that tell you the history of the place and what went on here. I’ll leave it up to you whether to read them or not.

This bench made from bicycles was probably the strangest thing I saw on this day. It doesn’t look very comfortable.

The city maintains this segment of trail and the have planted shrubs, including lilacs. Slowly, the buds are growing bigger.

They’ve also planted hydrangeas here and there. Panicled hydrangeas I believe, but there are so many different varieties these days I can’t keep up with them. I grew up with my grandmother’s “snowball” hydrangeas and that was good enough, even though I’ve never felt a need to have them in my own yard.

What I enjoy about hydrangeas is how, when their petals hang on through winter, they sometimes look like stained glass before they fall. These weren’t quite there yet.

This trail is one of those that the railroad had to build up quite high above the surrounding landscape so they could have a nice level grade throughout the run, and down below I spotted two concrete structures that I can only imagine must have been tank supports for a huge round tank. What was in the tank I’ll never know but it seemed too far away to be of use to the railroad. With so much industry in the area it could have held just about anything.

But the land owners didn’t want anyone exploring and I can’t blame them. You have to always remember when you are on a rail trail that you’re walking through the back yards of the people who live along it. I lived very close to a working rail line so I know what it is like to have some random person just wandering around through the yard after coming down from the tracks. It’s a bit disconcerting, so all of us who walk rail trails should stay on the trail and respect the privacy of those who live along them.

I found a poplar branch covered with black jelly fungi (Exidia glandulosa). They were a bit dry and had lost some of their volume but they hadn’t shriveled down too much. When they dry out they lose about 90% of their volume and shrink down to small black flakes, and it looks like someone has smeared paint or tar on the limb that they grow on. You can see that over in the upper right, how paper thin one of them has become. When it rains, they will all swell up like black pillows. Their reaction shows that jelly fungi are mostly water.

There were lots of self-seeded wild crabapples out here and the birds had been slow about it but they were eating them. A flock of robins can strip a crabapple of every bit of fruit in no time at all, so I doubt it was robins eating them.

There are lots of old repurposed factory buildings in this section of town is what this sign is saying.

And there is one of the old factory buildings that has not been repurposed. It’s easy to tell Kingsbury Corporation by its huge smoke stack.

It has lightning rods and steel bands, and many, many cracks. It even looks like it bulges a bit.

Some of the steel bands have and are falling off, which is just a bit alarming.

Kingsbury started out over a hundred years ago making toys, but evolved into a world leader in the design and manufacture of machine tools. Now the company has gone out of business and the building is all but abandoned. I worked there as an engineer for years until the bottom fell out of the engineering market pretty much all-over New England. When all the car companies went into a slump so did many other businesses.

The windows in the engineering department have been bricked up. Mechanical engineering was a job that I truly loved and I have many fond memories of my time spent here.

I used to have to cross a bridge different from the one this sign speaks of to get into the building. Beaver Brook actually flowed under the Kingsbury building I worked in and one year when it flooded all the wood blocks in a big wood block floor floated into a pile. It was a bit of a nightmare because it meant that area couldn’t be used to assemble machines.

This bridge over the brook is much different than the original railroad trestle but it serves today’s purpose. I was out here mid-day on a week day and I met a few people out using the trail. It was just after my retirement and I found myself feeling like I had skipped out of work and was slacking off. It has been a long time since I’ve been out walking on a week day so I’m sure it will take some getting used to.

Beaver Brook was staying where it belonged and looked good and clean. This brook, along with the Ashuelot River, is responsible for the town having grown up where it did. Between them they powered a lot of industry. The first sawmill and grist mill in Keene were powered by Beaver Brook. It winds its way through the heart of the city and it’s a fine thing unless and until it floods.

Another shrub the city has planted along the trail is the highbush cranberry, which isn’t a cranberry at all. It is a native viburnum named Viburnum trilobum with fruit (drupes) that resemble cranberries in color and shape. They are also said to taste like cranberries but I’ve never tried them. They’ll grow to 15 feet tall under the right conditions and these examples were quite tall. Birds are said to love the fruit and I was happy to see that most of them had been eaten.

White poplar (Populus alba) catkins were just starting to come out of the bud. They’re gray and fuzzy much like willow catkins and when they flower, they’ll grow to 3 or 4 inches long and fall from the trees in great numbers. This tree was imported from Europe in 1748 and liked it here enough to now grow in almost every state. It won’t be too long before their fluffy seeds will be floating on the wind.

There is a beech tree out here that shows what can happen when Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) twines itself around a tree. Luckily someone cut the vines away from the beech but it will now be deformed for life.

The tree looked healthy but it’s hard to say if it will live a full life with such a twisted shape.

This shot that I took previously shows what Oriental bittersweet was doing to a young elm. Elm is one of the toughest of our native trees but no tree can withstand the steel cable like strength of bittersweet. Once it wraps around a tree trunk the tree’s only hope of survival is to grow out around it and absorb it.

The trail goes on into downtown Keene and from there south into Swanzey, Winchester, and Hinsdale if you feel like a good long walk, but since I grew up walking these railbeds I’ve walked it all at one time or another, so I turned around here. Though it isn’t as nature filled as my usual walks I do like this part of the trail, especially in winter when everything is so icy.

It’s hard to leave the only place you’ve known.
~Lois Lowry

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A Rail Trail Hike

I’m still taking vacation days from work to use them up before I retire and that’s a good thing, because the weather forecast was for dangerous wind chills of -30 F last Saturday. Flesh freezes in 15 minutes in that kind of cold, I believe the weather people said, so instead of testing their accuracy I opted for a Friday walk, when the temperature was a balmy 36 degrees F. I chose a rail trail in Swanzey that I knew would have packed snow from snowmobiles, but I was surprised to see the summer gate still up. It’s there to keep wheeled vehicles off the rail trails in warmer months but is lowered in winter for snowmobiles. Still, there it was. In any event the snow had still been well packed by snowmobiles.

I like this trail because it still has a lot of the old railroad artifacts still here, like this whistle post. The W on the post told the engineer to blow his whistle or horn to warn traffic on the road up ahead. Where I grew up it was two shorts and a long on a horn and I could hear it inside the house with all the windows and doors closed. I used to love seeing those trains, so much so that I spent years building an HO scale model train layout.

Something else left out here from the railroad days is the stiff wire stock fencing they used to keep animals off the tracks. Miles and miles of it were strung along each side of the right of way, usually on stout metal posts, but in this instance a wooden fence post was used, and it showed its age beautifully, I thought.

Slowly, it was becoming hollow. The railroad came through this area about 150 years ago, and I wondered if this post had stood here all of that time. It looked like it might have so maybe it was black locust, which is known to last 100 years or more in the ground.

I saw many wood aster seed heads here and I noticed that many had been eaten, so that made me happy. Cardinals, chickadees, goldfinches, indigo buntings, nuthatches, sparrows, towhees and other birds are said to enjoy aster seeds, so that’s a good reason to let them grow rather than treating them as weeds.

The birds had picked this flower clean except for one tiny seed, and that was perfect so I could show you what an aster seed looks like. It has a little tuft of filaments at the top which acts as a parachute. When a seed hits the ground the wind can catch in the filament parachute and blow the seed along the ground to a spot where it can grow.

This is the second time in recent months that I’ve seen a bird’s nest in a shrub overrun with Oriental bittersweet. I can see how the invasive vine’s many leaves would provide good cover, but since the berries don’t appear until late fall, I doubt it has anything to do with the nesting bird eating them. It would be nice for the mama bird if she could just sit in the nest and eat the berries that surrounded her but nature doesn’t work that way. There is plenty to eat but they have to go and find it.

What does Oriental bittersweet do when there are no trees around to strangle? It strangles itself.

As I began paying closer attention when I was in the woods and became more aware of my surroundings, I noticed things on trees in winter that didn’t seem to be there in the summer. At least that’s what I thought but no, they were there all the time. It was just that they became more visible in the winter, like the way frullania liverworts darken to a dark purple color in the winter. All of the sudden the trees were covered by these dark spots, so I began looking at them closely.

The tiny leaves of frullania liverworts are strung together like beads. Some of them are said to be very fragrant but I haven’t been able to smell them yet. There are over 800 species of this liverwort. I haven’t tried to identify them but I have noticed that the ones I see must like high humidity, because they never grow too far from water.

This drainage ditch looked to be frozen solid. The black spots on the snow are hemlock seeds and scales from the cones. Birds and squirrels had been busy.

Not all of the drainage ditches were solidly frozen, so I got to see some beautiful patterns in the ice.

Beech leaves are falling I’ve noticed, and while I’ll miss seeing them I know they’re letting go so new leaves can appear in the spring. Seeing buds breaking on a beech tree is one of the great gifts of spring in a northern forest. How very beautiful they are as they unfold from the bud like silvery angel’s wings.

I saw a pheasant feather in the snow; the first I’ve ever seen that was not on a bird. This bird had met an untimely end, judging from what I saw just out of camera range to the left. I’ve learned to be at peace with seeing death in nature. Sometimes, as in the case of some fungi and trees I’ve seen, death can even be beautiful. As John Muir said “Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.”  

If you happened to be standing on top of a moving train, not knowing there was a bridge or tunnel up ahead, that probably wouldn’t have turned out well. To solve the problem the railroad came up with what they called “Tell tales.” They were lengths of soft, pencil thick wire that would hit you and “tell the tale” of a low obstruction up ahead. If you were smart you would drop to your knees immediately. These wires used to hang on either end of tunnels and trestles. I used to see them regularly when I was a boy but now this is the last one I know of.

The railroad engineers often used what they had at hand, like splitting boulders and ledges to get useable stone for building. In the case of tell tales they simply stood a section of rail on end and sank it into the ground. Then they added a rod that stood 90 degrees to the rail and hung the wires from it.

And here was the old trestle, just like the one that was near my house when I was a boy. Back then there was no solid floor like the snowmobile clubs have installed these days. Instead there were wooden ties, spaced just as far apart as they were on the railbed, and between each pair, far below, you could see the water. This was a fence when I was young, and it prevented me exploring the land of mystery to the south. I was told that little boys who weren’t careful could fall between the railroad ties and end up in the river, and for a while that possibility was an insurmountable fear. At six, seven or eight years old I was probably thin enough to actually fit between the wooden ties but I kept trying, going further and further out on the trestle, all the while hoping that a train didn’t come. Then one day at maybe twelve years old I made it across and I was free to explore the far side of the river. It was like a great space had suddenly opened around me, and I’ll never forget how happy I was about being able to see more of the river and the woods along its banks.

I looked at the Ashuelot River through a silver maple, which seems to lean just a bit more each time I come here.

There was ice along the riverbanks and since we’ve had below zero cold since I was there, I’m guessing it has grown some. It will grow from each shore and meet somewhere near the middle if it stays cold enough.

The snowmobile club had put up a warning sign on a pine tree, but I was more interested in the burl behind it.

Burl is an abnormal growth that grows faster than the surrounding tree tissues. They are thought to grow on trees that have been weakened by stress or damage.  Once the tree’s defenses have been weakened insects and /or fungi can attack and cause the abnormal growth. I see them all the time on hardwoods but not usually on evergreens. Woodworkers can make some beautiful things from burls.

You know it has been cold when the sap of white pines turns blue.

I finally found a fresh blueberry stem gall and all signs pointed to the tiny wasps still living inside, because when the wasps have left the gall, the sides are shot full of small round holes. Blueberry stem gall forms when a shiny black wasp called Hemadas nubilipennis damages a bud while laying her eggs on the tip of a tender shoot. The plant responds to the damage by growing a kidney shaped gall around the eggs, and this is where the larvae will overwinter before emerging as adults in the spring.

But not so fast. There was one very large hole in the end of the gall and that told me a bird, possibly a woodpecker, had robbed the gall of all the wasp larvae. I’ve seen this happen to the round galls on goldenrod and have seen black capped chickadees pecking at those. This gall and its inhabitants appear to be done for but someday I hope to be able to show you a fresh inhabited one.

My favorite thing from this day was this stump. No bigger around than a tennis ball where it was cut but it looked as if it had been there for a thousand years. It’s a good thing I have never found a way to bring all of the beautiful wooden things that I find in the woods home with me because I wouldn’t be able to move.

I don’t mind going nowhere, as long as it’s an interesting path. ~Ronald Mabbitt

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A Winter Walk in the Woods

Last Saturday was cold but clear with wall to wall sunshine. I decided to take a walk along the Ashuelot River in Keene to see if it had frozen over and was surprised to find that it had frozen over the whole length of the distance I walked.

It looked more like a pasture than a river.

I saw some strange animal tracks on the ice but I couldn’t get close enough to find out what animal they were from. They might have been from a rabbit or squirrel.

Wool grass (Scirpus cyperinus) likes wet places and grows here and there on the riverbank. Though its common name points to a grass this plant is actually in the sedge family. It is also called bulrush. Its seeds are eaten by waterfowl and muskrats will eat its roots. Native Americans used this plant to weave mats, bags and other utilitarian objects. I like its drooping habit.

Something that sets my blood racing at this time of year is bare ground, and I’m seeing more of it wherever I go. The sun gets stronger each day and no matter how many storms we have or how cold it is the snow will melt, starting on southern exposures. You can also see in this shot how the snow on the trail had been packed down by many feet. The going was easy as long as I stayed on the trail.

There were strange looking ice formations on the surface of the river.

There was some snow built up on the bent tree that lives out here. This tree never seems to get any larger.

I thought the beavers might have finished the job they started last fall on this huge oak tree but they’ve abandoned it. Girdling means that the bark has been removed around the entire tree and since the inner bark (cambium) is what carries nutrients and moisture to the crown, a tree cannot survive without it. Anything above the girdling will die.

It really is amazing what beavers can do with their sharp teeth. From what I’ve seen no wood is too hard for them.

I saw a girdled smaller tree and I can say for certain that this was not done by a beaver. I don’t know why anyone would do this unless it was the Keene Parks and Recreation Department wanting to remove trees along the trail. Girdling has been used to remove trees for thousands of years and the Native Americans who once lived and fished in this area surely used it to clear land. Once the trees died and fell on a piece of land the brush and trunks would be burned and the resulting wood ash and whatever rotting wood was left helped to fertilize the land for farming. Girdling is still used by foresters, horticulturalists and land owners today.

I saw many trees that had fallen naturally out here. In fact I see them wherever I go and most of them are white pines and red maples.

I was stopped by the bright, orange-brown color of a blueberry branch in the sunlight. I should have gotten a shot of its small red buds as well.

The sunlight was also caught in the trees and it was so beautifully golden against the deep blue of the sky.

I saw lots of oriental bittersweet berries (Celastrus orbiculatus) still on plants, and that’s a good thing. It means the birds aren’t spreading its seeds around.

Oriental bittersweet vines are as strong as wire and don’t expand as whatever they wrap themselves around grows larger. The alder with bittersweet wrapped around it in this photo will eventually be strangled to death unless something is done.

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

There are about 800 species of Frullania liverworts and many grow as epiphytes on the bark of trees and shrubs where the humidity is high. Epiphytic plants take nothing from the host plants they grow on, so this liverwort does no harm to trees. Its leaves are very small and hard to get a good photo of.

Something not quite so pretty as the frullania liverwort is the beech scale (Cryptococcus fagisuga) seen here. Excessive feeding by this scale insect causes two different fungi, Neonectria faginata and Neonectria ditissima, to produce annual cankers or blisters on the bark of the tree. The continuous formation of lesions around the tree eventually girdles it, resulting in canopy death.

You know it’s cold when pine sap turns blue, and we’ve had a cold February. It was about 25° F. (-4° C) on this day.

Yes it was cold but it was also a beautiful sunny day so I stood on the bridge for a while listening to the silence, which was broken only by birdsong and the occasional cracking of river ice. It would have been easy to lose myself and stand here for longer than I did but you have to watch that in winter because frostbite can be a possibility and once you stop moving you cool off fast.

On the way back I thought a contrail looked much like what smoke from a campfire might have looked like long ago. It wasn’t hard to imagine Native lodgings out there somewhere; archeological digs have shown Native Americans were here at least 12,000 years ago.

I decided to check on Ashuelot falls before leaving. They were all splash and foam and remained thawed for the most part.

There were some huge ice formations here and there though. This one looked like the arm and paw of a gigantic polar bear.

Above the falls I saw these strange tracks on the ice. They were big, easily as big as my hand, and I wondered if they might be moose tracks. Moose are occasionally seen in this area. They have even walked through Keene neighborhoods and down city streets. They also occasionally fall through the ice and it’s quite a job getting them back on dry land. An adult male moose can weigh over a thousand pounds.

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first; be not discouraged – keep on – there are divine things, well envelop’d; I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. ~Walt Whitman

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The Last of the Fall Color?

This will most likely be that last of the fall color posts for this year, even though many of the oaks are still beautiful. We’ve had freezing temps and even snow and pretty much all of the maple leaves have now fallen. And that’s what you see in the above photo, which shows one of my favorite fall scenes. It’s one of my favorites because it always reminds me of swishing through the leaves on the way to school as a boy and smelling that sweet, earthy, caramel and burned sugar fragrance. That fragrance never leaves you; it returns every fall, and so do all of the memories associated with it.

The maples were so beautiful this year.

But I’m guessing this view of one of the hillsides surrounding Keene doesn’t have a maple leaf in it. Most of what you see are oaks but I’m not sure about the bright yellows. They could be beech, poplar or birch. Some oaks do turn yellow but I’m not sure they get quite that bright.

Here is the other end of that hillside. Hickories also turn yellow and so do chestnuts, but of course the American chestnut has been all but wiped out. Elms also turn yellow but they’re not usually quite so bright as these trees are. Ash is another tree with yellow leaves in the fall but most ash leaves fell a month ago, so it’s anyone’s guess.

Here was a beautiful oak.

An in this overlook of the city of Keene you can see many more oaks. I didn’t know there were so many in the town center.

The ferns have also been beautiful this year. I can’t remember another year when they’ve been so colorful. You’d think it was a bouquet of flowers.

Here is another hillside up in Surry, which is north of Keene. It’s usually a good place to see fall color.

Here’s a closer look. My camera didn’t seem to like some of the colors.

And another close look at some oaks and what looks like a poplar in yellow.

I went to see Mount Monadnock in Jaffrey back when the maples still had leaves.

There were lots of people up there on this day. Mount Monadnock is one of the most climbed mountains on earth, second only to Mount Fuji in Japan. Even Henry David Thoreau found too many people on the summit when he climbed it in the 1800s. He, like myself, found the view of the mountain much more pleasing than the view from it. He said “Those who climb to the peak of Monadnock have seen but little of the mountain. It is remarkable what haste the visitors make to get to the top of the mountain and then look away from it. I came not to look off from it but to look at it. The view of the pinnacle itself surpasses any view which you get from the summit.” I agree.

I saw some bright yellow plants off on a hillside but I couldn’t tell what they were. Since the spot where they grew had been mowed I’m guessing that they were invasive oriental bittersweet vines. They grow very fast.

These were poplars in the sun.

Birch leaves usually turn bright yellow but sometimes a tree will have hints of orange.

I took so many photos of the forest at Willard Pond when I was there I still have some to show. This beautiful forest is mostly made up of beech, oak, and maple.

Here is another look. It’s one of the most beautiful forests I’ve ever been in.

Here is what the Ashuelot River in Swanzey looked like one recent evening when the setting sun made the light beautiful. The trees there on the right are oaks.

The burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) along the Ashuelot River in Swanzey have changed to their pink / magenta color. Just before the leaves fall they’ll turn a soft, very pale pastel pink but when this was taken they were still quite dark. The leaves on the trees above them seem to help regulate how quickly the 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.

And we have had some frosty mornings, and cold days and nights.

I loved the way the sun shined through this frosty silky dogwood leaf.

And the beautiful symmetry of these multiflora rose leaves.

And then of course, it snowed. But only three or four inches, and after a couple of days it was gone. Lately we’ve been enjoying sunshine and 70 degree F. weather, so we’re still on the weather roller coaster.

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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More Fall Color

Fall, or autumn if you prefer, continues to impress and amaze even those of us who have witnessed it for decades. Even drought muted colors can stop people in their tracks, and that’s exactly what happened to me when I saw the late afternoon sun just kissing the tops of these birch trees. For a few moments there was fire burning in the tree tops and it was beautiful.

I’ve paid closer attention to how trees change color this year and I’ve noticed that some start to change one afternoon and literally overnight they can double the color they had the previous day, and in this way they can go from green to red or orange in just a couple of days. That explains why I missed most of the color on this section of river this year; it all happened so fast. I’ve also noticed that you can find peak color on one side of town and virtually none on the other side, and you can be fooled.

This sugar maple is in a spot where I can watch it each day and I saw it completely change into its fall color in about two days.

Oaks are just starting to change. They and beeches are the last to change in this area.

The bright lemon yellow at the Branch River in Marlborough comes from invasive Oriental bittersweet’s fall color.

The trouble with Oriental Bittersweet vines is they’re strong as wire cable, so when they climb and wrap themselves around a tree they strangle and kill it. As the tree grows the bittersweet doesn’t give, and the tree dies.

I didn’t see any bittersweet at the Ashuelot River north of Keene but I did see plenty of color, including yellow.

We have 22 miles of trails where I work and this is the start of one of them. It’s a wonderful time of year to live and work in the woods.

The trees along the shoreline of this hill at Half Moon Pond in Hancock are wearing their natural fall colors, but the trees at the top of the hill were colored by the sun. Sun colored trees are often all the same color as these were. This was taken just as the sun was coming over the hill behind me in early morning and the sun often does this to this hill at that time of day.

I looked through a very red, red maple. Red maples don’t always turn red in the fall. They can also be orange or yellow. Sometimes they change color from what they wore the previous year, and I’ve seen lots of trees doing that this year.

Maple leaved viburnums (Viburnum acerifolium) are putting on a beautiful show this year. This native shrub has an amazing range of colors in the fall and I’m surprised more people don’t grow it in their gardens. It also has berries that birds love.

Here is another maple leaved viburnum looking completely different in color. 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.

This year the theme seems to be that I’m in the right place at the wrong time. Every time I’ve gone to How Reservoir in Dublin to see the beautiful colors there it has been cloudy or even drizzling. I’ve often thought that fall colors have more “pop” on cloudy days, but I’ll leave you to your own opinions about it.

That’s Mount Monadnock in the background.

Sometimes a single tree will beg all of your attention, as this one did on this day.

The mist was thick on this day but the colors were amazing.

Here are some trees in full sun. What do you think? Does shade or sunshine better show the colors. To me, possibly because I’m colorblind, these colors look washed out to me. They’re still pretty but to my eyes they don’t have the vibrancy of those in the shade.

Since all roads look alike as far as foliage goes at this time of year I’m not surprised that I’ve completely forgotten where this one is. It doesn’t matter; if you come here just drive on any road and you’ll see the same.

Highbush blueberries are showing some beautiful colors this year.

This hillside often has cows in front of it, and it is so locally famous for fall color that I’ve seen it in two different newspapers so far this season. By the time I got there many of the trees had already lost their leaves.

This maple had a lot of wow factor. It was huge; white pine trees are our tallest tree but this maple was keeping up with the pine tree right next to it.

I’ve chosen this photo as my favorite of this lot, not just because of the colors but also the wildness. It’s a place of quiet serenity where the silence is often broken only by the call of a loon or a flock of geese. On this morning a loon called. When you hear that eerie sound for the first time you might feel that you hadn’t really lived full measure until that moment, but no matter how many times you’ve heard it before everything will come to a complete stop when you hear it again.

Sometimes moments in life are so perfect you want to freeze frame them; capture them within your soul forever so they never fade away—they burn themselves into your being until they’re a part of who you are. ~Cassandra Giovanni

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A Walk in the Woods

Back pain led me to look for an easy place to walk, so I chose a familiar rail trail that I knew wouldn’t be too much of a challenge. Since I fell out of a tree and suffered a double fracture to my spine when I was a boy, back pain has been an old “friend” for most of my life. Usually it really isn’t that much of a problem but every now and then it becomes an issue, and I’ve found that the best cure for it is to simply walk it off.

It was a beautiful blue sky day with temperatures just above freezing, so walking was just what the doctor ordered. Actually in my experience the doctor will order you to go home and stay in bed for a week if you complain of back pain, but I’ve found that is the worst thing I can do. Keeping moving; that’s my cure.

I saw a log with some very strange looking branch collars on it. It was some type of evergreen, possibly spruce, but I’m not sure. The part of the tree that protrudes and surrounds the branch is called the branch collar and it should always be left intact when pruning. As can be seen here, the tree leaves it behind naturally.

Private suburban land abuts this section of trail along parts of its length and over the years the homeowners have planted numerous nonnative trees and shrubs, trying to screen their yards from the trail that cuts through them. A homeowner who lived along the rail trail had long ago planted a privet hedge and then never trimmed it so the hedge grew to about ten feet tall, and it was covered with berries that the birds weren’t eating. That’s a good thing because privet is considered invasive.

Evidence of the ice storm I wrote about in my last post was still seen over a week later, sparkling in the sun.

An Oriental bittersweet vine (Celastrus orbiculatus) decided it would try to strangle a large white pine tree. If the tree lives another 50 years or so the bittersweet will most likely win and the tree will die, because these vines are like steel cables. 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. 

Sometimes they even try to strangle each other.

The bittersweet berries are quite pretty but unfortunately they’re also quite tasty to birds, and of course that’s why they’re so successful at spreading throughout the countryside, and why they grow near trees and fences.

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years of doing this blog is how windstorms are becoming more numerous and more severe, and I saw evidence of it everywhere out here. Though it’s hard to tell from a photo this pine tree was the diameter of a car tire and it snapped like a toothpick.

The pine tree wasn’t the only tree that had fallen. Downed trees were everywhere.

I saw a child’s footprint frozen into the ice.

Then I saw a lot more children’s footprints leading off the rail trail into the woods. It seemed I had stumbled onto the trail to a secret hideout off in the woods. It wouldn’t be secret for long though, with all those tracks coming and going. I was tempted to follow the prints but I thought about how I would have felt if an adult had appeared at my secret hideout, so I kept going down the main trail.  

They had marked their secret trail with a broken concrete base to an old birdbath. How in the world did they get that out here, I wondered. It must weigh 50 pounds.

The secret hideout was on Yale Forest land, which borders part of the trail. This sign marking the forest is slowly being eaten by a tree.

These oak leaves shining in the sunshine were beautiful, I thought.

This oak was full of galls. There are horned oak galls, gouty oak galls, artichoke oak galls, potato oak galls, and oak marble galls. The photo above is of marble galls and they really are about the size of a marble. These marble galls are usually near perfect spheres. Some galls form on the undersides of leaves, some on the tree’s roots and others, like the one shown, on the twigs and stems. All are caused by different wasps or mites which will only lay their eggs on the leaves, roots, or twigs of their favorite species of oak tree. Iron sulfate mixed with tannic acid from oak galls made ink that was the standard writing and drawing ink from the 12th century until well into the 20th century. Some still use it today.

I’m not sure what happened here but this oak gall was seriously misshapen.

My back felt much better by the time I reached the trestle but it didn’t last so I’m still trying to walk it off as of this writing. It takes longer to straighten it out as I get older, but it will happen.

Every time I see the Ashuelot River from one of these old trestles I’m very happy that I didn’t have to bushwhack my way through the woods to see it. We’re very lucky to have these trails.

When I was a boy I walked the railroad tracks to get to my grandmother’s house but before I got there I had to cross a street. This was the same street crossing that, twice a day, the big diesel Boston and Maine locomotives would slow for. Before they crossed they would blow their horns to warn the cars on the street, and you could hear those horns from either my or my grandmother’s house, so I heard them twice a day everyday while I was growing up. Knowing all that you would think I would know what the W on this post stood for but it has taken me years to learn that it simply means “Whistle,” as in “blow your whistle because there’s a road crossing up ahead.” Two longs blasts followed by a short blast and a final long blast of the train’s whistle or horn is a Federal law and every train crossing a road has to abide by it to warn passing traffic. These days you’re more likely to see a flashing light or some type of barrier, but back then I could tell time by the horns on those trains.

These trains are just like the ones that rumbled by (and shook) my house for so many years. Once the trains stopped running it was very hard to see them tearing up all the tracks in this area, and it took several years before I could walk the rail trails left behind. Though I’m very thankful that we have the rail trails, seeing photos like this one is like seeing a photo of an old friend who has died. They roll by only in dreams now, hauling boxcars full of memories.

Human history and natural history are visible from trails. The old railroad routes through a town can show a lot about how the town developed, what it was like long ago. When you go through a town by bicycle on an old railroad route, the place looks very different than from the customary perspective of the car and the highway. ~Peter Harnick

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A Taste of Fall

Fall has slowly been making its presence known here in this part of New Hampshire and Half Moon Pond in Hancock is one of the best places to see it happen, because it always comes here before anywhere else that I know of. I’m not sure what the trees on the other side of the pond are but they always turn very early. The trees on this side of the pond are mostly maples.

And maples are changing too. I found this one in Swanzey.

Not only are leaves changing, they’re dropping as well.

River grapes (Vitis riparia) have ripened and hang in great bunches from the vines. If they aren’t all eaten they will begin to over-ripen and on warm fall days they make the forest smell just like grape jelly. River grapes are known for their ability to withstand cold and have been known to survive -57 degrees F. That makes them a favorite choice for the rootstock of many well-known grape varieties. We have about 20 native species of wild grape in the U.S. and Native Americans used them all. The fruit is usually too acidic to eat from the vine so they mostly made juice and jelly from them. They were also used to dye baskets a violet gray color.

Virginia creeper vines (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) climb high in the trees to reach as much sunshine as they can. They aren’t noticed for most of the year but when their leaves start to turn they can’t be ignored. Virginia creeper berries are poisonous to humans but many birds and small animals eat them. My mother loved this vine enough to grow it on the side of the house I grew up in. It shaded the porch all summer long.

Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) is another vine that climbs to the top of trees for sunlight but unlike our native vines this one is highly invasive and damages the trees it climbs on. It is the yellow leaved vine in this photo and it is slowly strangling an ash tree.

Black locusts (Robinia pseudoacacia) are trees that often change early. In June these trees are loaded with white, very fragrant blooms that hang down like wisteria blossoms. Black locusts were prized by colonial Americans for their tough, rot resistant wood. In 1610 colonists found black locust trees planted beside Native American dwellings and thought the Natives were using the tree as an ornamental, so they decided to use it that way as well .They also used the wood for ship building, forts and fence posts while the Natives used it to make bows and blow darts. It was once said to be the toughest wood in all the world and was one of the first North American trees exported to Europe.

The invasive burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) along the Ashuelot River will go from green to red, and then will finally become a soft pastel pink to almost white. Right now they’re in their loud orange / red / yellow stage. It’s too bad they’re so invasive because they really are beautiful, but they dominate the understory and create so much shade nothing else can grow.

A few burning bush leaves had already changed to pastel pink. I’ve seen thousands of these shrubs along the river drop their leaves overnight when the weather is cold enough and I’m hoping that doesn’t happen this year so I can show them to you in their pastel pink stage. When hundreds of them are this color it really is a beautiful sight.

I chose a swamp in Swanzey to show you what happens to white pines (Pinus strobus) in the fall. Many evergreens change color in the fall and many lose their needles. The row of pines are the taller trees in the distance in this photo, looking somewhat yellow brown.

These examples of fall color grew right at the edge of the swamp.

Dogwoods also grow in the swamp, and along with blueberries they often make up most of the red you see.

Native little bluestem grass (Schizachyrium scoparium) catches the sunlight and glows in what are usually luminous pink ribbons but every now and then you see patches of deep purple, as this example was. This common grass grows in every U.S. state except Nevada and Washington and is beautiful enough to be grown in many gardens. After a frost it often takes on a darker reddish purple hue, but we haven’t had a frost yet.

It’s the way its seed heads capture and reflect sunlight that makes little bluestem glow like it does.

Here is the same view from a different angle. I’ve learned that if you want to have blue river water in your photos you should photograph it with the sun behind you, and now I’m wondering if the same isn’t true with some grasses.

Virgin’s bower seed heads (Clematis virginiana) light up shady spots at this time of year and sometimes you can see hundreds of them together. Virgin’s bower is a native clematis that has small white flowers in late summer. An extract made from the plant is hallucinogenic (and dangerous) and was used by Native Americans to induce dreams. Mixed with other plants like milkweed, it was also used medicinally. It is a very toxic plant that can cause painful sores in the mouth if eaten.

Pokeweed berries (Phytolacca americana) are beautiful when they ripen to their deep purple-black. I love seeing the little purple “flowers” on the back of pokeweed berries. They are actually what’s left of the flowers’ five lobed calyx, but mimic the flower perfectly. People do eat its new shoots in the spring but all parts of this plant are considered toxic, so it’s wise to know exactly what you’re doing if you choose to try it. Native Americans used the plant medicinally and also used the red juice from its berries to decorate their horses. Recently scientists found that the red dye made from the berries can be used to coat solar cells, increasing their efficiency.

Why it is that in a field of thousands of goldenrod plants one or two will turn deep purple while the rest remain green is a question I can’t answer, but that’s often what happens. The plants somehow just decide to stop photosynthesizing earlier than all of their cousins.

We have several different varieties of sumac here and from what I’ve seen all are very colorful in the fall. This is smooth sumac (Rhus glabra.) At least I think so; I didn’t pay real close attention when I took the photo. It could also be shining sumac (Rhus copallinum.)

Most staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) are still green but this one had already gone to red. Sumacs 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. Once fall starts there is no stopping it and soon people from all over the world will come to enjoy it. I’ll do my best show you all of this incredible beauty that I can.

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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What a Day for a Daydream

Last Saturday’s sunshine and 50 + degree temperatures made it easy to fall into spring daydreams. I decided to walk along the Ashuelot river in Swanzey where there are witch hazels (Hamamelis virginiana) growing to see if they might be blooming. They often blossom on warm winter days and I’ve even seen them blooming in January.

The river had tamed itself and the water level had dropped considerably since the last time I was here. There weren’t even any waves to photograph.

There were ice baubles still hanging onto the twigs in shaded areas but their gray opaqueness told me they were rotting in the sun.

Here was one with a hole right through it, which I can’t explain. I’m guessing it was made by a twig, but where is the twig?

There was green grass along the river and that made it even easier to dream of spring. It was a beautiful day; a well-deserved bonus day after the terrible weather of the last month or two.

I’m not sure what caused this bright yellow color on this and a couple of other stones. It wasn’t lichen. These stones spend time submerged when the river rises so I wonder if it might be some type of algae. I doubt the color is natural to the stone itself, it looked more like it was on it rather than part of it.

The spot where the witch hazels grow is on a small peninsula that juts out into the river. There was a trail out to its end but it has come close to disappearing over the years. I thought it was an old fisherman’s trail but I’ve seen enough deer tracks out here to wonder if it isn’t a game trail. It’s still being used;  you can just see the disturbed leaves that mark the trail just to the right of center in this photo.

Off to the right of the trail, closer to the river, the high water mark lies just above silt which has been deposited by the river over the years. I’ve seen this high water mark grow closer and closer to the trail, which means flooding on the river is getting worse. This is a very scary place when the river is high.

The ice on this tree branch shows how high the water was just recently. I’d guess about two feet higher than it was on this day, and I’d have had very wet feet and probably wet knees as well.

The silt the river leaves behind is as fine as sugar and anything that falls or steps on it will leave a mark. Even raindrops pock mark it. I wondered if these tracks were made by a beaver but there were none of the usual claw marks. They were big enough to be made by a bobcat  and cats have retractable claws, so that’s a definite maybe. Whatever made them comes here a lot because there was a trail of these prints through the silt, going in both directions.

There are beavers here. This was a freshly cut tree, and a beaver would make a good meal for a bobcat.

The witch hazels were indeed blooming and even though these aren’t spring blooming vernal witch hazels (Hamamelis vernalis) the sight of flowers just made my dream of spring all the more real. The thought hit me while I was here that it is this intense longing for spring that makes winters seem so long for me. Desire causes pain. Remove the desire and remove the pain. It sounds so simple.

One of my favorite mosses grew on a log.  I love the way it reaches out to colonize new lands. I think it might be beaked comb moss( Rhynchostegium serrulatum) but I can’t be sure because I’ve never seen it with spore capsules. It might also be Isopterygium tenerum, which is another creeping moss.

A woodpecker had pecked very small holes in a limb that was no bigger than 2 inches across. I was thinking that it must have been a very small woodpecker when I heard a tapping behind me.

It was a woodpecker pecking at a tree and it wasn’t tiny. Judging by where its red spots are I’m guessing it is a hairy woodpecker, but since I don’t do birds I could be wrong. It didn’t sit still long, whatever its name.  There were lots of other birds here too including chickadees and juncos and this small piece of forest was full of birdsong, which of course made it seem even more like spring.

I think the reason so many birds populate this area is because there is plenty here for them to eat, but unfortunately much of that food comes from plants that are invasive, like the oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) seen here.

This maple tree shows what bittersweet can do when it wraps itself around a tree trunk. The vine is as strong as wire and doesn’t expand as the tree grows, so the tree has no choice but to grow out around it, and this deforms the tree.  The tree will eventually be strangled to death unless something is done.

I saw what looked like a blush of blue on a lichen that grew on a tree so I took a few photos of it, but it wasn’t until I got home and looked at the photos that I saw something very unusual.

Very unusual in my experience, anyhow; each of the lichen’s apothecia, which in this case are little round spots where its spores are produced, had liquid in them. It hadn’t rained for a while so I’m not sure what this is all about. I have seen lichens with wet apothecia right after a rain but nothing like this. This lichen looked more like moisture was being squeezed from it rather than it picking up any moisture from its surroundings. If you know what it happening here I’d love to hear from you. I’ve searched and searched but haven’t had any luck.

The sun had gone by the time I was ready to leave but that didn’t bother me because it had been a great spring like walk with plenty of interesting things to see. Any day that reaches 50 degrees in December is a good day in my opinion. That night I actually dreamed lilacs were blooming and the strangest thing about that is, I rarely remember my dreams.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. ~Edgar Allan Poe

Thanks for coming by.

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