Surprise Find at Mud Pond

With the return of semi-sweltering weather this past week, I sought the shade of the forested trail that circles Mud Pond at Moreau Lake State Park.  I wasn't expecting to find many woodland flowers in bloom by this time of the summer.  But I did find some plants that totally surprised me.

The typical forest-floor vegetation here is oak and pine saplings, native shrubs like Witch Hazel and Lowbush Blueberry, and many native shade-tolerant herbaceous plants, such as Pipsissewa, Cow Wheat, Wintergreen, Checkered and Downy Rattlesnake Plantain, and lots of White Wood Aster. (That's just a sampling!) But now, another native plant called Pilewort (Erichtites hieraciifolius) has shown up, and in alarming abundance.  Why is this  aggressive open-field colonizer suddenly colonizing this deeply shaded habitat? Could it eventually supplant the woodland plants that have thrived here all these years?

When I say that Pilewort has moved into this woods abundantly, I'm not kidding. Here it is lining the trail.

And in many places, the Pilewort has ventured well off the trail to spread across the forest floor.

The Pilewort has made itself at home here well enough to begin flowering, even in deep shade.  By the way, this is as open as those flowers will ever be, until they open up to big silken seed puffs.

I have actually often stopped to enjoy examining the flowers, which consist of merely a yellowish fringe atop tightly closed vase-shaped green calyces.  Here, you can see the pistils protruding from the Pilewort blossoms.

And here are the pollen-laden stamen tubes. I do find these flowers rather cute, even though I have to peer very close in order to see them.  The thing is, I have always in the past observed these flowers under direct sunlight in open fields.  How did the Pilewort make its way into this woods?

I've been walking this forested trail for many years and never noticed Pilewort in here, especially not in the abundant numbers that have moved in just this past year.  Another vernacular name for this species is Burnweed, suggested by its propensity to quickly colonize burned-over clearings in forests.  Could it be that this summer's unusually hot and dry weather, combined with the nearly complete defoliation of this woods earlier this summer (caused by a plague of Spongy Moths), have created the very sun-baked conditions similar to Pilewort's normally preferred habitat?   Whatever the causes, I was truly stunned to see how this plant is thriving now where I never found it before.

I did find a few other flowers in bloom as I made my way around the pond.  I did not expect to find Rough Hawkweed (Hieracium scabrum) along the wooded trail, since it, too, like the Pilewort, usually prefers a sunnier habitat. But there it was, despite the fact that shade has returned to this trail with the re-growth of deciduous tree leaves.

The White Wood Aster (Eurybia divaricata) appeared to be happy the shade has returned, since it lined the trail all around the pond with its snowy-white blooms.

Two different species of our native orchid called Rattlesnake Plantain (Goodyera spp.) can usually be found along this trail, but the population of both species seemed quite reduced.  I wonder if the changed sunlight and rainfall conditions this year had an impact on their numbers. In the spring, I found abundant rosettes of the evergreen basal leaves of Checkered Rattlesnake Plantain (G. tesselata), but now I could find only two blooming plants, despite a diligent search. This one still held some intact flowers, while the other plant had already gone to seed.

I found but a single flowering stem among an otherwise abundant patch of Downy Rattlesnake Plantain leaves (G. pubescens), the florets still in tight bud. But at least there was one!

Since the new tree leaves have once again re-grown to deeply shade the woods, it's no wonder I didn't see the web of this Spined Micrathena Spider strung at face height between two distant saplings. If I felt annoyed to be picking the web off my eyelashes, I imagine the spinner was even more annoyed that I had blundered through her handiwork.  (I know that this is a female Spined Micrathena, because the much smaller all-black males have no spines.)  She immediately shot along her escape line for a stationary post to await her chance to rebuild her web. That gave me a good chance to closely observe her remarkably spiky abdomen while (I imagine) she glared at me through all eight of her eyes, impatient for me to get lost.

 

I also imagined this pair of Jagged Ambush Bugs wanted me gone, since my presence would discourage any of their insect prey from landing among these Spreading Dogbane florets. I believe the pair were engaged in predation, not copulation.  I have read that the smaller male will often attach himself to a larger female, since she is more successful at snagging prey, which he can then also partake of, once she has had her fill.