The Key to Happiness: Fine Friends and Fun in the Forest

Last Tuesday, The New York Times featured a two-page spread in the "Well" section called "The 7-Day Happiness Challenge."  The article offered a weeklong regimen of activities to "help you focus on a crucial element of living a good life: your relationships," and also presented a quiz to assess "the breadth of your social ties."  Well, I sure aced that quiz! Especially such questions as "Do you participate in any group activities?" or "When was the last time you said 'yes' to a social plan with others?"  As any long-time reader of this blog would know, I am certainly blessed with (and eager to participate in) many opportunities to join with friends, with our social pleasure amplified by our walking in wondrous nature.  In fact, I  had just ventured out with the three friends pictured below (L-R: Dana Stimpson, Sue Pierce, and Tom Callaghan) to walk a favorite wooded trail at Moreau Lake State Park called the Cottage Park Trail.

 The trailhead for the Cottage Park Trail lies across Spier Falls Road from the Sherman Island Boat Launch Site on the banks of the Hudson River, which is where we met, arriving from points north and south.  Before heading off to our trail, we had to linger a moment just to marvel at the beauty of the river islands and forested mountains so perfectly reflected in the quiet water.

The Cottage Park Trail is named for the various structures that housed workers who labored to build the nearby Spier Falls Dam that crosses the Hudson. Remnants of those buildings can still be found near the trailhead, the old stone foundations now thickly covered with lush green mosses.

This trail eventually leads to the heights of the Palmertown Mountains that rise from the riverbanks, but it first heads through a wooded lowland that's home to several species of birch.  This Yellow Birch (Betula alleghaniensis), lit by the low winter sun,  shone in that light as if its bark were composed of hammered gold leaf.

We found Black Birch here, too, but this Gray Birch (B. populifolia) caught our attention more, thanks to the very obvious chevrons that climbed its nearly-white trunk.  These inverted Vs are a helpful distinguishing mark, for the Gray Birch's bark can be nearly as white as that of a young Paper Birch. (We did find some Paper Birch in this woodland, too.)

Sadly, almost all of the mature American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) in this woods showed the pock-marked bark that is a result of the mortal disease now infecting most of our native beeches.  Luckily, the disease did not deter our resident Pileated Woodpeckers from searching the dying wood for the insects that live within. There is no mistaking the very large, long oval pits hammered out of the trunk by this, our largest woodpecker.

We enjoyed searching the forest floor for any evergreen plants that thrive there, and we were lucky to find a patch where numerous plants of the moonwort called Dissected Grape Fern (Botrychium dissectum f. obliquum) were thriving. Close by was a second form of this same Grape Fern species with more intricately cut leaves, that one known as B. dissectum f. dissectum.

This time of year, the winter-persisting fungi offer us nature lovers many examples to ponder, and almost all of them resemble in some way that most ubiquitous shelf fungus called Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor). The Turkey Tail fungi feature zonal stripes of alternating smooth and furry textures and of  alternating colors.  Most of the true Turkey Tails we found today were in shades of tan and gray with vivid gold stripes.

But here, sharing the same ailing beech limb with the specimen shown above, were some Turkey Tails featuring stripes of avocado green.

On another beech limb were Turkey Tails that reserved the green color for patches near the base.  (Or is that a green alga using the fungus as a host?)

Here's a close look at how truly furry the furred regions of a Turkey Tail cap can be!

No matter the varying colors and textures of the Turkey Tail caps, the pore surfaces underneath appear the same pale beige color with minute pores.

The caps of these stripy shelf fungi do look kind of like Turkey Tail, do they not?  But wait!

Turn them over and find pore surfaces of a fine-toothed texture and rusty color, quite unlike the pore surface of Turkey Tail.  And then, to confuse us even more, this Violet-toothed Polypore (Trichaptum biforme) displays neither the pores that the name "polypore" would suggest, nor the purple color that the name "Violet-toothed" would suggest.  This time of year, the vivid purple seen in the summer has faded nearly completely.

When I came upon this log that was nearly completely covered with these pure-white caps that resembled sea shells, I probably should have tried to determine the species.  But I didn't. I just stood and admired them for their beauty, even in their bleached-out state of decrepitude.

I was also content to "let the mystery be" regarding these pretty mushrooms, too.  Pretty on the gill-side, that is, while faded to a generic white on what was visible of the caps' surface, mostly hidden as it was by the twig the caps were attached to. I believe at least one of my companions got an i-Naturalist suggestion that these might be a species of the Crepidotus genus. 

And now for something completely different!  Still a fungus, though, but one without gills or pores: a purple-tinged crustose fungus called Silverleaf (Chondrostereum purpureum).

We continued on the Cottage Park Trail, crossing two powerlines with open-meadow habitat lying beneath the pylons and wires.

Here in this open grassland we found the remnants of many sun-loving flora, including the intricate seedheads of many Wild Bergamot flowers (Monarda fistulosa).  Even the dried remnants were beautiful, and they still possessed the strongly minty fragrance they emitted when in flower.  After I pinched one of these seedheads, the fragrance remained on the fingers of my glove for the rest of our adventure here.

Another common denizen of sun-baked clearings like this is the Round-headed Bushclover (Lespediza capitata). This plant's multiple round flowerheads are stacked on a single stem, and its floral bracts, empty now of seeds, remain visible all winter.

Ah, now we have reached today's goal destination! Near here is where the Cottage Park trail starts to sharply ascend toward the mountainous heights of the Palmertown Range, and this photo reveals how precipitously the terrain has changed. But the four of us have no desire to climb a mountain today, for what interests us are not mountaintop views but rather what plants we might find on this bedrock or inhabiting this forest floor with its soils enriched by lime-delivering springs and streams.

We particularly wanted to see this patch of Foamflower plants (Tiarella sp.) that have crowned this steep bedrock cliff.  Because of the plants inhabiting this bare rock instead of growing on softer woodland soil, we can see its long stolons dangling over the face of the rock, stolons that in a woodland would grow invisibly under the ground or beneath the leaf-litter of a forest floor.

Here's a closer look at the Foamflower stolons dangling over this cliff.  When I first encountered this particular Foamflower patch and showed photos of these dangling stolons on Facebook, I heard from some botanists who informed me that the presence of such long stolons had convinced some taxonomists that the species of Tiarella found in this part of North America is NOT the species we have always known it by -- cordifolia -- but rather the species these botanical taxonomists are calling stolonifera.  We wildflower-obsessed amateurs were excited to have this chance to observe in person what the professional flower folks were discussing among themselves.

While combing the forest floor at this site below the rocky cliffs, we found little evidence of other of the many native wildflowers that abound here in the spring, including some -- Canada Violets, for example -- that would indicate the presence of lime in the soil.  We did, though, find these colorful wintering-over leaves of Sharp-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica acutiloba),  a calciphile species that definitely prefers a lime-rich woods.

An unexpected final delight greeted us when we discovered the pooled remains of a tiny creek that had only recently been flowing across the forest floor, thanks to recent rains.  Another habitat to explore, the habitat of flowing water rendered in frozen crystal!

And oh, what exquisite icy wonders awaited, each tiny pool offering different beautiful forms that flowing water can assume in freezing temperatures.  Some pools held glassy bubbles.

Other tiny pools held curvaceous swirls and curving lines.

Although solid now, the ice revealed so clearly the swirl and flow of the water as it incrementally froze. 

This starburst pattern of radiating crystal needles had me audibly gasping with delight.

I think I could add "seek out some dangling Foamflower stolons and frozen crystalline forms" to that New York Times article about how to find happiness. With the added advice, that you will be even happier when you find them along with good friends.