Bog-Trotting With My Best Nature-Nut Pals

I am such a lucky nature nut!  Not only do I live surrounded by fabulous natural areas, I have the best equally nature-besotted pals who love to explore them with me. These are friends who don't mind taking an hour to walk fifty yards, often spending as much time on their knees examining tiny finds through their loupes as they do on foot. Or searching the treetops for a sight of the loudly vocalizing Scarlet Tanager that hides from view despite its vivid plumage.  Or thumbing through guidebooks or smartphone apps for assistance in identifying some unfamiliar species.  And these friends not only happily share all they know about plants or birds or bugs or fungi or mosses and more, they also know secret places to go to find the best stuff. And they share those secrets with me.

In this photo above, three of my best nature pals -- Sue Pierce, Ruth Brooks, and Evelyn Greene -- are leading me toward a secret bog that they know of, where we hope to find some really rare plants. And we only had to walk about a mile down an old logging road before we plunged through dense forest to reach that bog.

There are no nicely groomed trails through this woods, so we had to make our own way to the bog, pushing through face-clawing spruce boughs and teetering over ankle-twisting blowdown.

Hmmm . . . .  Evelyn seems to be pondering which rotting log could support her progress through boot-sucking muck.

The swamp-soggy logs were covered with so much and so many kinds of beautiful mosses, we often felt reluctant to step on them. And of course, our pace was slowed for another reason, simply because we had to stop to see if we could put a name to many of them.

Ahhh! We reached the bog at last!  A large sun-drenched sphagnum mat stretched to the edge of a pool that was rimmed with Black Spruce, typical vegetation of a northern bog.

The sphagnum mat was dotted with hundreds of the dark-red flower heads of Northern Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia purpurea).

Sprouting up from mats of red sphagnum, the vase-shaped leaves of the Pitcher Plants were filled with water, this carnivorous plant's method of obtaining nutrients by drowning insects trapped within the leaves.  The plant will then absorb and digest the insects.

The flowerheads of Northern Pitcher Plant can be quite beautiful. And they certainly have a very distinctive structure!

Another common inhabitant of northern bogs, called Labrador Tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum), was currently in full bloom, bearing clusters of white flowers above its leathery inrolled leaves that are green above but covered with orange fuzz beneath. The flowers are not noticeably fragrant, but the crushed leaves certainly are, with an aromatic scent that produces the signature smell of northern bogs.

Sheep Laurel (Kalmia angustifolia) is another shrub common to northern bogs, and we were visiting this bog at the right time to enjoy its beautiful flowers.

The bright-yellow flowers of Flat-leaved Bladderwort (Utricularia intermedia), while small, were easy to spot, protruding from the dark water at the edge of the bog mat. We could even see the spiky underwater leaves of this carnivorous plant, although I could not make out the tiny sacs the plant uses to suck up even tinier underwater organisms.  Most members of this genus, being leafless, depend solely on their underwater sacs to obtain needed nutrients.  But this species,  since it does bear leaves, appears to obtain at least some of its nutrients through its green leaves, via photosynthesis.

As we walked near the edge of the woods that surrounded the bog, we found large patches of one of our prettiest late-spring wildflowers, a diminutive species called Twinflower (Linnaea borealis), each plant bearing two identical pendant pink flowers atop a single hairy stalk.

We had encountered hundreds of Bog Buckbean's three-leaved plants (Menyanthes trifoliata), but only a very few were still bearing the distinctive white flowers, each bloom lined with curly hairs. All others had gone to seed by this late in the spring.

We were lucky today to have Evelyn with us, for she alone among us knew what we were looking at when we found this heap of old water-logged deer droppings.  What looked to the rest of us as if it could be some kind of green algae, Evelyn recognized as a special moss that only grows on animal dung.  In fact, it is called Pennsylvania Dung Moss (Splachnum pensylvanicum). It looks as if a spider has spun some webbing (now strung with tiny water beads) among the dung, as well. A surprise find, indeed!

And here was the treasure we'd hiked a long distance and struggled through clawing blowdown and boot-sucking mud to find: the exquisite native orchid called Dragon's Mouth (Arethusa bulbosa). Although it is classified as a Threatened species in New York State, when this orchid finds a habitat that meets its requirements (cold northern acidic bogs and fens), it can sometimes appear in large local populations. I can't recall exactly how many my friends and I found this day, but I believe it was somewhere around 30 beautiful hot-pink specimens.

Our treasured bog species located and admired, we were ready to start the somewhat difficult journey back to our cars.  Ah, but where did we come out?  We had to study the deeply wooded edge of the bog before one of us sighted the bright tape Ruth had tied to a tree where we had emerged.

Trudging somewhat wearily back along the same abandoned logging road we had walked before, we were delighted to find that these flowers of Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium sp.) had opened since we'd passed them some hours before, when the flowers were still in tight bud. We were intrigued by the very slender leaves and stalks, as well as the plant's clumping habit, and hoped that the open flowers might help us determine its species.

Well, the flowers looked pretty much the same as those of other Sisyrinchium species we frequently find, so that didn't help. But the long, almost needle-fine bracts surmounting the flowers were an important clue. As were the very narrow leaves, barely one-sixteenth of an inch wide. Also, the slender stem was not winged the way the stems of some other species of Sisyrinchium are.

When I got home, I searched my Newcomb's Wildflower Guide and there I found a description that seemed to perfectly describe our plant: "Stem without a bract in the middle and unbranched, flower cluster overtopped by a pointed bract. Stem very slender, barely winged, 1/16" wide, leaves much shorter than the flowering stems."  Newcomb called it "Slender Blue-eyed Grass (S. mucronatum),"  which would be the same species the New York Flora Association's Plant Atlas calls "Sharp-tipped Blue-eyed Grass," in reference to the sharp bract that surmounts the flower.

Here's what else I learned about Sisyrinchium mucronatum from the NYFA Plant Atlas: this particular species of Blue-eyed Grass is actually an Endangered species and has never been reported from the county where we found it.  Wow!  If this Blue-eyed Grass is truly what I believe it is, it is rated even rarer than the Dragon's Mouth orchid we'd ventured out onto that bog to see. And we found dozens of the plant along that old logging road. 

I guess you can imagine how excited this wildflower-obsessed nature nut was to learn what we  had found.