Autumn Variations

The intensity of autumn color sure varies from year to year.  These next three photos from a blog I posted back in 2023 appeared in my Facebook Memories yesterday.  All three were taken on the Hudson River, above and below the Spier Falls Dam.  2023 sure was a great year for fabulous foliage color!

This rocky outcropping juts into the Hudson where a forested slope of the Palmertown Mountains falls directly to the waterside.

This tiny islet adorned with brilliantly scarlet Black Huckleberry shrubs lies mid-river just off the Sherman Island Boat Launch Site, along Spier Falls Road:

Here's another of a trio of mid-river islets that lie just off the boat-launch site, its foliage colors (and those on the riverside mountain slopes) burnished by golden sunshine and rendered even more beautiful by rippling reflections.

The day was equally sunny yesterday (10/19/26), so that was my cue to hurry over to visit the Hudson River along Spier Falls Road to see if the foliage colors were equally vibrant this year.

Well, not quite. But the mirror-still river beneath a clear blue sky beautifully reflected the beauty of the riverside forested mountains as they were.

I often pull over along the road to gaze at my favorite view of this part of the Hudson, where small islets lie midstream, and a series of receding mountain slopes define the curves of the river. The scene still looked quite lovely, if not as dramatically colorful as it sometimes appears on other autumns.

 

As it happened, this young couple also pulled over while driving along Spier Falls Road, in order to view this lovely Hudson River scene. Their names were Ben and Andreina, and they were visiting the area from their home downstate.  I was delighted to take their photo using Ben's phone and also this one with my camera, and they were happy to have me do so.  I hope they enjoyed their journey through the rest of our beautiful region.

Our Own Saratoga Mushroom Day!

The Split-gill Fungus (Schizophyllum commune), one of the amazing mushrooms worth celebrating on National Mushroom Day.

I did not realize that yesterday (10/15) was National Mushroom Day, but I sure was observing it (even if unaware of it being this special day) by enjoying the many, many mushrooms my friend Sue and I were finding along the trails at the Rowland Hollow Creek Preserve in Saratoga Springs.  This preserve consists of 45 acres of woods and wetlands surrounding the Rowland Hollow Creek and is part of an innovative conservation subdivision project in conjunction with an adjacent housing development and Saratoga PLAN (Preserving Land And Nature). This combination of development and preservation created a wonderful opportunity for people to live, recreate, and enjoy their natural surroundings, while protecting vital natural resources.  I am slated to lead a walk here next week for our friends in the Thursday Naturalists, so I always like to have some sense of what we might find.  And boy, did we find a LOT of fungi!  

We also found other interesting natural things along the trails, but since we are celebrating mushrooms on this post, I will post only the fungi here, in alphabetical order (according to vernacular name, unless I don't know it for that species) : 

Blue Stain Fungus (Chlorociboria aeruginascens)

We usually see only the blue stains on the rotting wood of fallen trees, either hardwoods or conifers. But once in a while, we do find these bright-aqua fruiting bodies, a delightful surprise!

Caramel-colored cluster of small mushrooms (species unknown)

To properly ID a mushroom, I'd have to dismantle it to explore how the stalk is attached, etc., or make a spore print, among other operations. But I was content just to admire how pretty these mushrooms looked, all in a row.

Crimped-gill Fungus (Plicaturopsis crinita), caps

Crimped-gill Fungus (Plicaturopsis crinita), crimped gills

This is a mushroom that definitely lives up to its name!

Fan-shaped Orange Jelly (Dacryopinax spathularia)

Another fungus with a name that fits: it's orange, kind of jelly-like, and somewhat fan-shaped.

Jelly Dots (Helicogloea compressa)

I have never found any vernacular name listed for this tiny slimy fungus, so I made this one up: Jelly Dots!

Lemon Drops (Calycina citrina)

Lemon Drops is a good name for this fungus found nearly year-round on rotting stumps.  But so is Fairy Cups, another name for it.

Multiclavula mucida (White Green-algae Coral)

Note the green algae these tiny spiky coral fungi are sprouting out of.  This fungus depends on that algae for its existence.

Lumpy Bracket (Trametes gibbosa), top

Lumpy Bracket, gills

I thought this might be Oak Maze-gill at first, but my friend Sue learned from the experts at iNaturalist that it was Lumpy Bracket instead.

Orange Jelly Fungus (Dacrymyces palmatus)

I am never sure whether this is Orange Jelly or Witch's Butter, since one grows on hardwoods and the other grows on conifers, and the rotting twigs I find it on usually offer few clues as to their species. My mushroom guide (George Barron's) suggests that Witch's Butter is less likely to be found this far east.

Shrimp of the Woods (Entoloma abortivum)

This mushroom that looks like a glob of dough (and thus does not look very appetizing) is said to be one of the most delicious of all the fungi. It is actually a "mummy mushroom" that has been parasitized by the fungus Entoloma abortivum, which will parasitize other mushrooms, especially the Honey Mushroom (Armillaria mellea), creating these shapeless blobs that are sometimes called Shrimp Fungi.

Small mushrooms (one orange, four tan), very cute, but species unknown. I was content to adore them without having to take them apart to try and ID them.

Split-gill Fungus (Schizophyllum commune), gills

Split-gill Fungus, caps

 Now that I know this mushroom's name and have learned something about it,  I do believe that this fungus could be called the "Easter Fungus," replacing the Bunny as a symbol of resurrection and fecundity. The Split-gill Fungus possesses the amazing property of being able to dry out completely and then rehydrate to keep functioning sexually time and time again.  It is one of the sexiest organisms imaginable, with at least 28,000 different sexes, according to mycologists' calculations.  The process is too complicated for me to repeat in my blog, but you could find more information about this on Google. I find this fungus frequently in woods all around Saratoga County.

Stereum (species unknown)

I often find various species of Stereum fungi in my woods walks. All are very thin and flexible, with no obvious spore-producing organs on their fertile surfaces. But they certainly are prolific, often occurring in masses that cover rotting logs.  And most are as striped and colorful as this one.

Variable Oysterling (Crepidotus variabilis) -- maybe?

I admit I am only guessing about the name of this species, since most guides mention how small that species is, and some of these were at least an inch across.  But every other detail fit.  This is from George Barron's guide:  "Fan-shaped with an inrolled margin, shelving, laterally attached, and fragile. Gills are well-spaced and white, ageing brown. Stalks are absent."  Any mycologists out there who can help confirm this species?

Violet-toothed Polypore (Trichaptum biforme)

This is one of the most common mushrooms in the woods I regularly haunt. Sometimes it covers large areas of standing trees, and it persists for several years, its  cinnamon-brown "teeth" opening up to look more like pores, and its purple rims fading to colorless as its flexible caps harden. Old caps often play host to green algae, which provides the proper habitat for another fungus called "Fairy Pins," so small you almost need a magnifier to see them.  It's seldom we see so purple a margin on this mushroom.  This must be a youngish one. My friends and I truly love this mushroom. I'm glad we could find a nice young population on this National Mushroom Day.

Here's one of my favorite photos of Violet-toothed Polypore, taken last April.  Aren't mushrooms amazing?  I'm glad there's a day set aside for celebrating them.

Two Ways of Being Beautiful!

Here's a post from a couple of years ago that I found quite intriguing and beautiful. And also, since this was an event I'm not likely to experience again, I wanted to repeat it:

Saratoga County, NY. 10/13/24.  While walking the shore of Moreau Lake, I saw these perfectly beautiful leaves and fruits of Maple-leaved Viburnum  (Viburnum acerifolium) leaning out from the woods.  No other shrub bears leaves of this gorgeous pinky-purple color in the fall, and it is rare that I find both the leaves and the berries of this native shrub so beautifully intact.  So I promptly stopped to take a photo.

I was grateful to have the sunshine illuminating both leaves and flowers so perfectly. But then a wispy cloud drifted across the sun, and rather than diminish the beauty of these leaves and fruits, the change of light transformed their color remarkably.  The yellower tones of the sunlit leaves gave way to the bluer tones of the leaves in veiled shadow.  

One shrub, two different lights, two different colors, two different ways of being absolutely beautiful! 

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 starbursts of 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 even as we paddled along the shore.  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!