Ascending to Porcupine Haven

My nature buddies and I had one more day to enjoy the snowy woods before the rains returned on Friday.  And what better way could we spend that day but by hiking up the mountain at Moreau Lake State Park to see if the Porcupines still claimed a series of caves up there as their denning territory? 

Although the temps rose into the 40s, snow still covered the forest floor (the better to follow the Porkies' trails), and the stream we call Zen Brook was flowing exuberantly down the mountainside. It's quite a steep climb up to Porcupine Haven, a cluster of small grottos carved into marble outcroppings, most likely created by the same flowing waters that fill this brook. This climb was a first test of my injured legs since their bashing in a car crash a month ago, and I was quite delighted to discover I managed it okay.

 

As soon as we entered a dense Hemlock forest near the mountain's summit, we found abundant evidence of Porcupine travels, their low-slung bodies creating troughs through the snow that were pocked with the tracks of their wide flat feet. Unlike many other wild animals that wander the woods in search of food, a Porcupine finds a likely tree to feed on and returns to the same site again and again, eventually packing the trail to the point where the individual footprints can no longer be discerned.

All we had to do to find a den was to follow a well-packed trail to where it disappeared within the dark depths of a cave in the rocky outcroppings.  The trails were also marked by dribbles of yellow urine, shed hairs, and occasional quills, if we needed further evidence that such trails belonged to Porcupines. In this photo, Porkie's comings and goings appeared quite evident.

Nearby was a second cave that obviously was providing shelter to another Porcupine.

At one den site, friends Nancy, Noel, and Tom examine the animal tracks near the mouth of one cave, as well as the plants that cover the rocky outcroppings.  In the foreground, Sue is perusing the various mosses that thrive near a second cave.

A third cave opening reveals a stream coursing through it,  rendering its interior inhospitable for any Porcupine den.  But the watery habitat only made it more welcoming to insects that find winter shelter amid such damp spaces. I could detect a number of tiny flying insects darting around the dark interior.

Since some of these insects were performing an up-and-down bobbing dance in the air, I could assume they were male Winter Craneflies engaged in their distinctive mating behavior, intended to entice the ground-dwelling females to rise up to join the males in mid-air, before returning to the ground to lay their now-fertilized eggs in the leaf litter.

One of the insects did land on the snow, which helped to confirm its identity as a Winter Cranefly (Trichoceridae genus). I also noticed a Porcupine hair sharing the snowy surface.

The calcareous nature of these rocky outcroppings could be deduced from the various plants that thrive on them, since many of these plants would occur only on lime-rich rocks such as limestone or marble. That would be true for the round puffs of Rose Moss (Rhodobryum ontariense) seen here poking up from amid the slender fronds of Walking Fern (Asplenium rhizophyllum), a distinctive fern that travels across its moss-covered rocky habitat by creating new plants wherever the tips of its long skinny fronds touch down.

I never did learn which moss Noel and Nancy were examining here, but it might have been a species of Hedwigia, a moss that can grow on either calcareous or acidic rock.

Sue is here searching amid the flowing water of a nearby stream for a moss known to prefer just such a wet habitat.

And find it, she did! The moss is called Fontinalis antipyretica (or Common Water Moss), a moss that grows underwater with long trailing stems that flow with the current.

A close examination of its leaves revealed that they were folded sharply along a midline, the fold-line forming a prominent keel, which suggested another vernacular name for this aquatic moss,  the Keeled Water Moss.

We were also intrigued by the variety of fungi still evident in the winter woods.  Among the more interesting was this Ceramic Fungus (Xylobolus frustulatus), with small, hard, flat crust-like clusters that resemble broken pieces of ceramic tile.  My Baron's mushroom guide indicates that this distinctive and unusual fungus that grows on old debarked oak logs is "widely distributed but not common."

This large patch of overlapping striped caps had me thinking they must be a species of Stereum fungus, they were so uniformly and vividly colored and thin and tough.

But then, I looked at the underside and discovered a fertile surface covered with tiny pores.  As far as I knew, all Stereum species have a smooth underside with no visible pores.  All these tiny pores indicated I must be looking at the real Turkey Tail Fungus (Trametes versicolor) and not the Stereum species called False Turkey Tail.

We were all stymied by these small patches of rubbery red pustular stuff on a fallen log, especially when Nancy used her cellphone to access iNaturalist, which named it as a species in the order Cantharellales.  That can't be true, I thought at first, since Cantharellales is the order that includes Chanterelle mushrooms, and I could not imagine how that stalked edible fungus could be related to these rubbery gelatinous blobs. Well, it turned out that iNaturalist was right.  The name of this red stuff turned out to be Tulasnella aurantiaca, and it is indeed included in the order Cantharellales. Who would have thought?!

Here's a closer look at Tulasnella aurantiaca to better indicate its texture and size. Apparently, this fungus is not that uncommon, but its small size makes it easy to overlook. It should be hard to miss that red color, though.

We never know, each time we venture out to the woods, what new marvels we might find.

Here was one last amazing find: a pair of Porcupine footprints, clearly defined in the soft wet snow and showing the claws as well as the soles of the feet.  Rare indeed is the opportunity to see such clear footprints, since Porkie's habit is to trample its own prints over and over again in its daily travels along the same trail.