Visual Treats in the Late Winter Woods

While we wait for our local forest floors to be paved with colorful spring wildflowers, are there any visual treats to be found right now among the sodden and dull dead leaves that carpet the woods?  Oh, there certainly are, as some friends and I discovered this week as we ambled about a swamp-sodden woods at Bog Meadow Brook Nature Preserve on the outskirts of Saratoga Springs.

Before we even reached that swampy woods, we were halted in our tracks as we walked along an oak- and beech-leaf-littered trail.  Wow!  Just look at all these thousands of tiny snow fleas crawling and hopping about among the dry leaves!  We usually find these springtails peppering the surface of late-winter snow, but these tiny critters are active all year wherever the forest floor remains damp. 

Despite possessing six legs, snow fleas are not true insects, but instead are members of the Collembola taxonomic class, a very large class with several thousand member species found throughout the world. All are tiny, wingless hexapods that can catapult impressive distances due to a spring-loaded organ called a furcula that is tucked up tight against their abdomens.  Snow fleas are not rare at all, but it's always an unexpected treat to come upon masses of them.

And look at this!  A genuine spring wildflower!  Or should I say wildflowerS, since each of those yellow tufts adorning the interior spadix of this Skunk Cabbage spathe (Symplocarpus foetidus) is an individual male (staminate) floret, ready to offer pollen to any early pollinators. And to have those pollinators carry that pollen off to fertilize female (pistillate) florets covering the spadix of a neighboring Skunk Cabbage plant in bloom.

From the many dozens of Skunk Cabbage plants sprouting up from the muddy edges of a small creek, our friend Sue extracted two spadices, one with staminate flowers (left) and the other with pistillate ones, the sexes having bloomed sequentially, the pistillate ones first, ready to receive pollen from neighboring plants in staminate bloom. It isn't often we get to see the two kinds of florets so clearly.

The Skunk Cabbage plants were the only spring wildflowers yet to bloom, but we did find evidence that some gorgeous wildflowers will bloom here later in the summer.  This prickly green basal rosette will eventually produce a towering stalk, well over 6 feet, to be crowned with bright-pink puffy Swamp Thistle flowers (Cirsium muticum).

And here was a pretty, rosy-hued leaf that offered proof that the native wildflower called Foamflower (Tiarella stolonifera) is a regular inhabitant of this swampy woods.  The plant's new leaves have yet to appear, but when they do, they too will persist through next winter, their green color eventually yielding to this lovely pink before they fade away as new leaves emerge.

I do not know how my friend Sue Pierce managed to spy these remnants of Yellow Bartonia flowers (Bartonia virginica), nearly invisible as they were among the yellow-brown forest-floor leaves. But Sue is famous among our friends for having such keen eyesight. The tiny flowers bloomed last summer, but the then-blooming florets did not look much different than these dried pods.

These wiry stems of Dwarf Horsetail (Equisetum scirpoides) were abundant across this swampy tract, looking hardly any different from how they will appear in the summer.  Among the five species of Horsetail that thrive in this place, this is the only one that retains its green color all year. 

Oh boy, look at this gold mine of treasures for those who love mosses and liverworts!  Such a fallen log has reached the perfect stage of decomposition to provide just the right damp habitat for certain  bryophytes to thrive on. My friends are leaning in for close observation. Since many mosses require microscopic examination to determine their species, I usually fail at accurate IDs, while content to admire their beauty.

Among the beautiful mosses we found was this ample clump of lacy, fine-leaved loveliness, but it was growing on the ground instead of that log.  I am still in the process of trying to ascertain its name and will return to identify it when I do. There were tiny water droplets among its miniature leaves that caused this moss to sparkle in the light.

I did recognize this moss as a species of Fissidens (Pocket Moss), a genus that usually requires microscopic examination to identify as to species. I love its ferny appearance.

Again, I could only admire this moss without knowing its name, delighting in the delicacy of its leaves  and the drooping capsules atop its slender spore stalks.

At least I did recognize this clump of leafy liverwort with the texture of snakeskin that was sharing its space with tufts of moss poking through it. Or at least I think I do.  I learned it as Conocephalum conicum, but scientific names are constantly being changed these days, as molecular research reassigns many species. It has several interesting vernacular names, including Snakeskin Liverwort (obvious) or Great Scented Liverwort, thanks to its distinctive scent.

Liverworts come in a wide variety of textures, including this fluffy stuff that I learned to call Lovely Fuzzwort (Ptilidium pulcherimum).  The leaves of most liverworts look about the same in winter as they do the rest of the year,  making them easy to identify at any time, once we learn learn their names.

Two other liverworts shared the same rotting log as that Lovely Fuzzwort. The rusty-red ones with curling leaves is called Rustwort (Nowellia curvifolia), and the pale-green one with the toothed leaves is called Variable-leaved Crestwort (Lophocolea heterophylla). These two liverworts are often found close together, frequently intertwined.

And then there were the fungi!  It's still a bit early for even the early fruiters to show up yet, but this interesting chunky one called Ceramic Parchment (Xylobolus frustulatus) can be found on rotting wood (most often oak) all year. It does bear a resemblance to ceramic tiles fitting together, and it's just about as hard as ceramic tile, too.  Wikipedia states that the fruiting bodies are perennial, forming a new layer of spore-producing tissue on top of the old fruiting body every year.  As a result, the zone lines around the edges represent old layers of growth, much like the rings of a tree. 

The aptly-named Turkey Tail Fungus (Trametes versicolor) comes in a variety of beautiful colors, and it also retains much of its color through the winter.  So although these specimens likely fruited last fall and not recently, they still looked quite beautiful.

If you tried to ID this fungus by Googling "avocado-green shelf fungus" you'd not have much luck.  The fungus itself is actually the Violet-toothed Polypore (Trichaptum biforme) -- and it does have a purple edge when fresh.  It's only green now because it is covered with a green alga. Luckily, we can still identify this fungus by its distinctive pore surface, even when covered with green stuff.

Another clue to this fungus's ID requires a very close look. See all the itty bitty, almost invisibly small dark pin heads sticking up from the surface of the cap?  Those are a second fungus called Fairy Pins (Phaeocalicium polyporaeum), and they are known to prefer the caps of Violet Tooth Polypore, especially when those caps are covered with green algae.  In my experience, these Fairy Pins tend to occur most frequently quite late in the winter, after the growth of algae has succeeded in covering the caps.

Here was another shelf fungus hosting a lovely growth of green algae.  I wish I had paid attention to the species of tree it was growing on, for that might have helped me identify which shelf fungus it was.  Sue found a possibility on iNaturalist, which suggested Lumpy Bracket (Trametes gibbosa), so we could go with that. Its top was certainly quite lumpy, and Lumpy Bracket is frequently colonized by green algae.

Here's the pore surface of that fungus, displaying a maze-like texture that resembled that in photos of Lumpy Bracket.  So let's go with that name for the present.

Here was one last treat we found, and it was quite a vivid find!  At first we wondered if it was some kind of fungus that had grown on old wasp nests.  But I remembered seeing it before, many years ago, when I was surprised to discover it was not a fungus, but rather a slime mold species in its spore-producing stage, after its fruiting bodies had matured within those wasp-nest-like structures visible behind all the fluffy spore stuff. And guess what the name of this slime mold is!  Why, it's actually called the Wasp Nest Slime Mold (Metatrichia vesparium)! A visual treat, indeed!