Another Rainy Day, Another Nature Preserve

More rain today.  But only off and on.  During a break between downpours this afternoon, I dashed off to Bog Meadow Brook Nature Trail just outside of Saratoga Springs, hoping to find a few Canada Lilies (Lilium canadense) there. In previous years, I would find dozens of these gorgeous native lilies along this forested trail.  But the Scarlet Lily Beetle larvae have been destroying more and more of them each year.  Would any have survived?

I am happy to report that yes, a few Canada Lilies have indeed survived.  Among all the green of the mid-summer woods, their brilliant colors of oranges and yellows certainly did stand out,  so it was easy to spot a few.  Sadly, the giant multi-flowered specimens I used to find here have all disappeared.  All the lilies I found today bore but a single bloom.

But this gorgeous single bloom was worth wading through wet greenery to gaze upon more closely!

Very few flowers bloom in the gloom of a mid-summer fully leafed-out woods, but Pointed-leaf Tick Trefoil (Hylodesmum glutinosum) is actually quite happy here, to judge from the many specimens I found in full flower today.

The wee-flowered woodland plant called Enchanter's Nightshade (Circaea lutetiana) also prefers a shaded woods to bloom in, and I did find a few.

Not a flower, but this Eastern Bottlebrush Grass  (Elymus hystrix) did display a showy presence, with its spiky yellowish seed-heads standing out against a background of Hog Peanut's three-parted leaves.

Considering how soggy it was and has been for several days, I was surprised to find so few fungi fruiting today at Bog Meadow.  I did find this slime mould fruiting, though, a tiny patch of Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa, maybe two inches long, on a rotting log.  I might have mistaken it for one of our furry white caterpillars sheltering there from the rain

 Slime moulds are neither flora nor fungi, but occupy their own place in the natural scheme of things.  George Barron, in his guide Mushrooms of Northeast North America, writes that "slime moulds don't fit easily into our classification system:  they move and feed like animals; they engulf all kinds of organic particles in their paths . . .; they digest what they can; and animal-like, they violently eject unwanted particles. [They] are fungus-like, however, in producing fruitbodies that contain spores, which are dispersed by wind." What I found today on this rotting log was a mass of those tiny fruitbodies.

As with fungi, we are most likely to find fruiting slime moulds after a stretch of rainy days.  Also, that's when we're likely to find lots of pesky bugs as well -- mosquitoes, of course, but also tiny gnats that were swarming in front of my face, not biting, but gagging me when I breathed them into my open mouth. This was my solution today: poke fern fronds behind my ears, held in place by the temples of my glasses, so the fronds waved around my head and face with every step I took, fanning the gnats away.

I passed a fellow who was using this trail for his daily running workout. He didn't stop to chat, of course, but he did kind of give me the side-eye.