A Fine Day For A Farewell Paddle

My friend Sue Pierce calls the three of us nature explorers -- herself, Ruth Brooks, and me -- "The Three Graces" because we so often wander the woods and climb the hills and paddle the waters together as a trio. But I would alter that moniker to "The Three GraceED,"  because we are so truly graced to have so many wonderful places to explore on foot or by canoe here in northeastern New York.  One of our favorite wonderful places is Lens Lake, a quiet mountain-ringed, forest-shored, bog-islanded lake up a long ascending road from the village of Stony Creek in Warren County.  We three friends had hoped to paddle this beautiful lake early last Tuesday, as a final co-adventure before our friend Ruth headed to her winter home in Florida very soon.  But our plans were canceled that day by cold temps and brisk winds making any paddling adventure not only miserable but also risky, in our low-to-the water solo canoes.  But lucky for us, that weather changed to delightful by this past Saturday.  Yes, it was still nippy enough for longjohns to feel welcome while starting out, but oh! the lake was nearly as still as glass, the better to mirror the surrounding autumn glory and for us to enjoy a splendid farewell paddle with our dear friend Ruth.

 

We won't see Ruth again until she comes back north again next spring, but we hope she carries with her some memories of how gorgeous an October paddle on an Adirondack lake can be. And Sue and I will retain our memories of how much we love to just BE with her, as each of us shares our delight in and our knowledge of our nature finds, as well as our more personal stories and concern for one another through life's pleasures and difficulties. I feel so profoundly blessed to have such friends as Ruth and Sue. I love to see Ruth so content in her own little solo canoe, one that gives her access to places as rich in delights as Lens Lake is.

And what a day on the lake we had! How wonderful, to witness this colorful shoreline forest!

Especially when such vibrant blueberry shrubs and this parade of tall pines are reflected almost perfectly by the still water!

The surrounding mountainsides were a veritable crazy-quilt of vivid colors, edged by a hem of dark conifers.

All around the lake's bouldered shore, tree-topped rocks were covered with colorful shrubbery, the beauty amplified in shimmering reflection.

Out in the lake itself, even otherwise barren boulders held surprising bits of prettiness.

Several shoreline shrubs surprised us with their own "bits of prettiness."  The twigs of Labrador Tea held evergreen leaves and also rosy cone-like buds. These are not buds that will open soon, but buds that will safely shelter next spring's flower clusters throughout the coming very-cold Adirondack winter.

Who would expect to find these bright-pink Sheep Laurel flowers blooming this time of year? This is ordinarily a species that flowers in June! But because I've been finding a few repeat-blooming flowers as late as October for several years, I would have been quite surprised and disappointed if we had not discovered some this year.  And we sure did! A little farewell flower bouquet for our friend Ruth!

Since Lens Lake is known for its acres and acres of floating bog mats, we also would have expected to find plenty of sphagnum moss on our paddle.  And so we did, in several vivid colors.  This cluster held long leaves of a bright lime-green. (And I bet that Ruth, a serious student of mosses, would know the names of these sphagnums.)

This was a fallen tree stump nearly completely covered with a mass of ruby-red sphagnum.

Much of the floating bog mats here are covered with golden-yellow sphagnum, and this patch served as home to several tiny coal-black Earth-tongue fungi.

The bog mats are also studded with many plants of Northern Pitcher Plants, some of which had achieved their optimum level of scarlet saturation.

Abundant patches of Large Cranberry vines sprawled across the bog mats, and some of those patches held a few ripe-red fruits.  Not many, though, which suggested to me that local folks might have already started harvesting them.

After witnessing all these vividly colored plants, I was surprised to find myself delighted by the more subtle colors of this nearly leafless shrub that had sprawled across a shoreline rock.  What was it that delighted me so? The sprightliness of its silvery-hued twigs, the lower twigs gracefully arching downward while its upper twigs reached for the sky? The tiny remnants of various colored leaves that nestled amid the twigs like ornaments in a Christmas tree? Or its vaguely animal-like appearance, like some chubby, furry but sharp-quilled creature, a vegetable hedgehog or porcupine? I don't know. But I still stop to gaze at it and smile each time I review this post.

Here's another organism that amuses and delights me, each time I visit Lens Lake. These masses of underwater transparent greenish jelly are formed by the colonial microscopic single-celled protozoan called Ophrydium versatile. The individual cells line up side-by-side in the "blob"and attach themselves to a jelly-like substance they secrete.  They are symbiotic with microscopic Chlorella algae that live inside the Ophrydium cells and give the blob its green color.  Over the years of paddling here, I have found masses of it as small as a golfball and as large as a bathtub, and my friends and I agreed we saw more than ever this year. This would be a great health report for the lake, since Ophrydium requires clean, transparent, low-nutrient waterbodies with low levels of dissolved organic carbon to thrive. So my friends and I should have other years left to paddle these waters together again.

The low-nutrient aspect of Lens Lake's water is evidenced by the large acreage of acidic bog mats that populate the surface of the lake.  And such bogs are often home to tall stalks of Cottongrass that sway and dance, each stem seeming to move to its own music, as they were doing today, even on a day with very little wind.  I will pretend that the Cottongrass was simply waving our friend Ruth farewell as she prepares to head south.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember this photo I once posted on my blog of a Merganser family atop a boulder in Lens Lake. It first was posted on nearly the same October date back in 2018.

And guess who was occupying the very same mid-lake boulder this time as we paddled Lens Lake this October?  Not the same brood of Mergansers, of course, but could it be possible the occupancy lease to this perch passes down from generation to generation?  Ha ha!

I was sorry our approach to the boulder disturbed the Merganser family.  But considering their history, I'm sure they will soon be back atop their favorite perch.  May this be a good omen that we, the Three Graces -- Ruth, Sue, and I -- will again return to this exquisite lake, when Ruth returns to adventure with us in the spring.

Changed Plans On a Cold and Blustery Day

We had plans, my friends Ruth and Sue and I, to paddle a beautiful mountain-rimmed, bog-islanded lake this past week.  The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the day seemed right for exploring the sphagnum-carpeted islands and shrub-crowded shores of Lens Lake in the mountains above the village of Stony Creek in Warren County.  But when we got there, the temps were still in the 40s, the wind was whipping up waves on the lake, and oh man, this scene did not tempt us at all! And all three of us had driven quite a few miles to meet at this location.  What else could we do around here to satisfy our naturalist urgings?

Lucky for us, Sue remembered once visiting a beautiful nature preserve nearby, and she also  remembered how to lead us there, to the Francis J. Dean Farm Heritage Trails, a short drive away.

And it was so inviting! Paved trails led across rolling meadows and into a forest and along a creek, and  best of all, a bright sun soon warmed our shoulders as we started our explorations.

We soon took a trail that led us along a boardwalk into a forested swamp.

We were impressed by the size of the beaver dam that held back a stream to form a pond.

Lining the boardwalk were native shrubs beautiful with berries, bright-red ones on the Winterberry bushes (Ilex verticillata) . . .

. . . and a mix of bright-pink and navy-blue fruits on the trailside Northern Wild Raisin shrubs (Viburnum cassinoides).

We soon entered a woods, where fallen logs held a fascinating variety of life forms working to return those logs to the soil: the fungi, lichens, mosses, and liverworts that all contribute to the logs' decomposition.

Both Sue and Ruth are passionate "mossers" who enjoyed determining which species were finding a home on this rotting log.

I am at the age and stage of brain deterioration where the names of things leave my memory bank as soon as I learn them, so I am content to at least know which organisms belong to which kingdom.  I did not bother to suss out the name of this white fungus, although I was fascinated by how "furry" its fertile surface appeared to be. Thanks, Sue, for consulting iNat and for suggesting the name Cyanosporus livens for this furry fungus.

But I was not sure if these rosy tubular growths were a fungus or a slime mold or what? I bet my friends will be able to tell me, and if so, I will come back and add it here. I had never seen anything quite like it before.

Sue and iNat to the rescue again:  This pink stuff is indeed a slime mold, Arcyria stipata.  And when I looked it up on Google, I discovered it has the most amusing vernacular name: Squirmy Wieners! 

It could be that these pin-head-sized orbs spreading across a sawn stump were a fungus I once recognized as Fenugreek Stalk Balls (Phleogena faginea).  If I had determined whether the stump was that of an American Beech (the preferred wood of that species), or if I had sniffed one of the stalk-balls to see if it smelled like curry powder, I would have been more certain about the species. 

At least I did recognize that a ruffly green liverwort called Lovely Fuzzwort (Ptilidium pulcherrimum) and a greyish-colored lichen called Pixy Cups (Cladonia sp.) were sharing this space on a log.

Is this lovely moss Delicate Fern Moss (Thuidium delicatulum)? And which Bedstraw species is the plant with six whorled leaves?

We were all delighted to find this maple leaf on the forest floor, one of many that were marked by the signature circular markings and cut-out holes made by the larvae of a fascinating insect called the Maple Leafcutter Moth (Paraclemensia acerafoliella).  It was our friend Sue who a few years ago first noticed such distinctively marked leaves and told us about this tiny creature with its fascinating behavior, how it both eats the leaf tissue and creates folded-over shelters out of the cut-out circles of leaf.  And here's a link to a detailed description of the life-cycle of this amazing insect by the biologist Bryan Pfeiffer. Prepare to be astonished!

After so much kneeling and crouching and crawling on the damp, chilly, deeply shaded forest floor for some time, we welcomed the sun-warmed rolling meadows our trail next led us to.

Although at first I regretted that most of the meadow vegetation had been shorn, I soon learned that this mowing was an important way to maintain this particular preserve.  I was grateful to read this sign as we entered this habitat:

And I was also grateful that a few patches of our native Little Bluestem Grass remained unmown. I love how the fluffy seedtufts on the ruddy stems of this grass appear to shine in the sun.

The trees at the edge of the meadow were beginning to glow with their autumn colors.

This stand of tall slender Quaking Aspens (Populus tremuloides) demonstrated how this tree must have acquired its names (both scientific and vernacular), as the bright golden leaves shimmered in constant motion against the clear blue sky. 

 I look forward to returning to walk these Dean Farm Heritage Trails in different seasons, when spring ephemerals bloom in the woods, and sun-loving late-summer wildflowers thrive in the yet unmown meadows. What a happy find, when we decided our plans for a paddle were not to be!

One Misty, Moisty Morning on the Mud Pond Powerline

Lucky for Sue and Ruth and me, this past Tuesday was relatively warm, because it sure was wet! Not pouring, just misty, but the crowded vegetation along the Mud Pond powerline was sopping enough to soak our shoes and pantlegs as we pushed through the overgrown shrubs that are filling in what once was a  powerline clearcut.  We were on a mission to find the seedpods of several special plants that we've found blooming here in past summers, seeds that could be used to begin cultivation of plants appropriate for growing in the new sandplain Big Bend section of Moreau Lake State Park,  once the preparation for that habitat  has been completed.

The mistiness of the day certainly added to the beauty of the location.  Although the weight of water droplets had flattened the ordinarily fluffy plants of Pink Love Grass in a patch of meadow, a closer look would show us how those droplets added a sparkly aspect to the grass.

Lovely!

Everywhere we looked, some ordinary tuft of vegetation had been transformed by diamond sparkles.

Spiderwebs strung between grass stems were beautifully bejeweled, and this creation of a Bowl-and-Doily Spider (Frontinella pyramitela) was especially interesting. This tiny spider weaves a fairly complex sheet web system consisting of an inverted dome-shaped web, or "bowl," suspended above a horizontal sheet web, or "doily." The spider hangs from the underside of the "bowl," and bites through the bowl's web to allow any prey that lands there to fall down into the doily's webbing. This web design allows the spider to survey its prey from below the bowl while remaining in a protected position above the doily.  I believe the heavy water droplets in this case have caused the "doily" to sag until it looks more like a bowl!  I hope, for the spider's sake, the strategy still works!

UPDATE: If you click on this photo and look at the far right of the upper web, close to the arching grass stem, you can see the little black and white spider hanging on the underside of the "bowl."

Considering the dampness of the day, we shouldn't have been surprised to find several glossy patches of Nostoc commune, a colonial species of cyanobacterium that forms gelatinous masses on the ground.  When wet, Nostoc commune can be olive green and shiny, like it was in the patches we found, but it will turn brown when dry. Unlike some other species of cyanobacteria, Nostoc commune is not toxic to humans or animals, and is, in fact, eaten in certain Asian cultures. I have yet to try eating it.

The sections of this powerline that once consisted of open meadow are now filling in with Hazelnut shrubs and sapling conifers and other trees, since the power company agreed to stop spraying herbicide beneath the lines. The state park now has the responsibility to remove the woody growth that could interfere with the lines, and park managers are devising plans to do so soon, along a limited stretch of this powerline where protected plants are known to grow. We explored the once-clear area that Sue is here about to enter, where low-growing mosses and other plants now struggle to thrive with the increasing shade.

We did find areas still healthily carpeted with beautiful mosses, including this Bristly Haircap Moss (Polytrichum piliferum), the starry leaves of which end in long fine hairs.

Extensive patches of Common Haircap Moss (P. commune) still thrive along here,  and much of it is studded with small silvery-gray Humpback Mushrooms (Cantharellula  umbonata), a fungus that has a strong preference for mosses of the Polytrichum genus.

I do not know the name of these little tan mushrooms that also like to grow knee-deep in Haircap Moss.  I just called them "pretty maids all in a row!"

More Haircap tufts and some truly tiny mushrooms (species unknown).

I do believe the name of these itty-bitty mushrooms is Marasmias capillaris.  They spring up after rain, sprouting atop fallen oak leaves littering the forest floor. Then disappear as soon as the leaves dry out again.

Here's a fascinating fungus I find only in hazelnut shrubs, and sure enough, I found this example in an American Hazelnut shrub (Corylus americana) along this powerline. It's called Glue Crust Fungus, and this photo shows exactly how it has glued a dead twig to a living one. This is to prevent that dead twig from falling to the ground, where rival fungi could consume it. It absolutely astounds me that a fungus can behave in such a strategic self-serving manner!

Several species of clubmoss also thrive in this yet-open area, and the Tree Clubmoss plants (Dendrolycopodium obscurum) held slender golden spore-cones stiffly erect above their green branches.

I usually associate sphagnum mosses with bogmats, but several discrete patches of this rosy-colored Small Red Peatmoss (Sphagnum capillifolium) grow quite happily amid other mosses that occupy the dry sandy soil beneath this powerline.

As we return to the powerline trail and push ahead through the crowding shrubbery, we are delighted by the vivid foliage colors along the way.

Abundant thickets of Shining Sumac (Rhus copallinum) contribute the most spectacular scarlet leaves.

As we proceed, we note the location of seed-bearing plants, whose pods might be collected to begin cultivating future plants. We had no trouble locating several plants of Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), thanks to the bright-yellow color of both leaves and pods.

Finding the plants of Blunt-leaved Milkweed (Asclepias amplexicaulis) was much more difficult, since we find fewer and fewer plants of this beautiful milkweed species along this powerline every year, especially as woody plants take over. We did find one plant with maturing seeds that we could report to those who are doing the propagation. Other plants we found had been decapitated, either by deer or flower-pickers.

Happily, Green Rock Cress (Borodinia missouriensis), despite its status as a Threatened species in New York, was more abundant than the milkweed, and each plant always produces plenty of its distinctively arching seedpods.

Sad to report, though, that our few plants of the native American Climbing Bittersweet (Celastrus scandens) did not produce a single berry this year. I did find healthy terminal clusters of flowers on the vines in June, but a late frost dropped the flowers before they could produce fruit. At least the vines still thrive, so maybe next year. . . .

We did not find any moths or butterflies or other flying insects on this damp chilly day, but we did find one of our most colorful caterpillars, the larva of a Brown-hooded Owlet Moth (Cucullia convexipennis). Despite being one of the drabbest-imagineable moths as an adult, this is a caterpillar that certainly vies with autumn trees for gorgeous colors!