Autumn Color Everywhere!

Autumn's glory approaches its fullness! And where better to witness this glory's arrival than paddling a quiet Adirondack lake, especially one ringed by forested mountains? When I joined my friends Ruth and Sue at Lens Lake in Warren County this week, we could see that the colorful foliage had yet to reach full crazy-quilt vibrancy, but there was no denying that it was surely beautiful, while yet promising even more vibrant colors to come.

Even the Fragrant Water Lily pads were assuming warm hues to match the shoreline trees, the sphagnum-carpeted bog mats, and the shrubs that crowded the boulders along the rocky banks. 

Before we headed out to explore the bog mats, we drifted closely along the shore,  where quiet backwaters were lined with colorful shrubs, and the still water reflected lovely gardens that had sprouted from waterlogged fallen trees.

My moss-loving pals found much to engage their attention among the moss-covered logs and lichen-frosted stumps.

I felt less obsessed than usual to put names to every beauty I found, and let my eyes instead of my intellect have full rein today.  I did happen to know the name of these dew-spangled Round-leaved Sundew plants, but even if I hadn't, just enjoying their rosy sparkle was adequate and joy-filled satisfaction.

The same, for these tiny red-capped fruticose lichens poking up from a verdant velvety moss.  Even if I did not already know that they were called Lipstick Powderhorns, I bet I could have assigned them that name, just from the way they looked.

The flowering shoreline shrubs held just as much beauty as they had held when they first bloomed last June, the Sheep Laurel actually putting out a second explosion of bright-pink flowers.

And the Labrador Tea shrubs were studded with pretty pink terminal "buds,"  but not buds that were due to open soon.  These cone-shaped growths won't open until next spring, when clusters of pretty white flowers will emerge.

This fallen log was covered so thickly with such a variety of colors and shapes, it reminded me of a  colorful medieval tapestry.  I could almost imagine a Unicorn prancing amid the tiny Large Cranberry leaves and its bright-pink orbs,  the urn-shaped pot-bellied green leaves of a Purple Pitcher Plant, and the scarlet-blotched leaves of a baby Red Maple.

But the bog mats soon beckoned, glowing gold and surmounted by multi-colored mountain slopes.

Drifts of white-tufted Cottongrass floated above the carpets of red and gold sphagnum moss. The Cottongrass tufts danced in the breeze, and also danced again in rippling reflections.

This clump of glossy scarlet and lime-green Pitcher Plant leaves was remarkably robust.

Two different species of sphagnum, one red, one gold, mingled their colors like those in a Persian carpet.

Studding the golden sphagnum were many ripe red fruits of Large Cranberry.

The formerly pink and green leaves of Marsh St. John's Wort had assumed their autumnal ruby red.

A second St. John's Wort species also decorated the bog mat, but this one, called Dwarf St. John's Wort,  had much daintier leaves of a gentler shade of rosy red.

Small floating mats bore the meandering yellow-green ropey branches of Bog Club Moss,which shared its crowded muddy habitat with the spiky remains of Yellow-eyed Grass, Pipewort, and White Beaksedge.

Here and there on the vast bog mats, small young Tamarack Trees still held onto their bright-green needles, which soon will turn golden before dropping off for the winter.  This common denizen of bogs is our only deciduous conifer.

Tamaracks can grow quite tall, but none will ever grow taller than our native White Pines, some of which have attained astonishing heights on the rocky islands that dot the surface of Lens Lake.

One Red Maple stood out from others along the shore, both for its height as well as for the vibrancy of its scarlet leaves.

From craning my eyes to admire these tall trees, I next turned my gaze to see what I could see beneath the water's surface. I soon spied some feathery ropes of Common Bladderwort floating free while submerged, and a few of them held bulbous green orbs at their tips.  These orbs are called "turions," and they are the winter buds of these bladderworts. The turions will sink into the mud after the rest of the plant disintegrates from freezing, and a new plant, a clone of its parent,  will sprout from the turion in the spring.  Although these bladderworts do produce above-water flowers and are capable of reproducing sexually by the production of seeds, they also continue to spread their populations by this vegetative method.

Paddling over some sunken tree limbs, we saw what looked like lengths of green yarn caught in the twigs and waving around underwater.  I lifted up a portion of this "green yarn" to examine it more closely. Its gritty texture, composed of silica, convinced me that this was Freshwater Sponge, a colony of tiny animals that filter water through their bodies, absorbing oxygen from the water and feeding on waterborne food particles.  Their presence in a lake is usually an indication of clean water.

But here was the most amazing underwater "being" we saw today, a bulbous mass of transparent greenish jelly submerged in shallow water close to the shore.  These blobs, which occur frequently in this lake, are formed by a colonial microscopic single-celled protozoan called Ophrydium versatile.  As I once learned from the Ask the Naturalist blog, these colonies can be found all over the world in fresh water.  The individual cells line up side-by-side and attach themselves to a jelly-like substance they secrete, eventually forming blobs of different sizes, from as small as a marble to as big as a bathtub.  They are symbiotic with microscopic Chlorella algae that live inside the Ophrydium cells and give the blob its green color.  When the sunlight illumines these colonies beneath the water, they assume a wonderfully mysterious green glow!

Here was one last amazing thing we found at Lens Lake this day: a mass of baby spiders, still residing in their webby nest before wafting off on breeze-lofted filaments of their own web.  Sue saw this mass first, attached to the twigs of a waterside shrub.  

At first, especially when I saw the pale, dry, cast-off skins of the molting spiderlings, I was concerned that all were dead, perhaps killed by frost.   But then I spotted the larger, darker spiderlings that were definitely wriggling around. They were too small for me to determine their species, so I will just call them Adorables. This was just one more delight of this absolutely delightful day in one of the most beautiful places on earth.