Mowing Mania

For many years, I visited the nearby Bog Meadow Brook Nature Trail to exult in the gorgeous Canada Lilies (Lilium canadense) that used to grow there. They grew there abundantly, in every color this native wild lily is known to grow in.  Orange was the most typical color:

And sometimes the orange-flowered specimens produced extravagant numbers of flowers per plant:

Yellow was also a not uncommon flower color:

Red was not a common a color for these lilies, but I found that color occasionally. And sometimes the red ones were red and yellow bi-colored:

These lilies usually grew close to the trail, but occasionally I would see their brilliant flowers glowing like lamps quite a distance away in the forested wetland:

All so gorgeous.  And I could count on them always blooming close to the Fourth of July,  like silent fireworks, their flowers as bright as bombs-bursting-in-air. So 8 years ago, on July 4, 2017,  I headed out to Bog Meadow Brook Nature Trail as usual, expecting to find the lilies' usual brilliant display.  But this is the horror-show I found instead:  hardly any signs of Canada Lilies at all, and otherwise only the remnants of them, with chunks of the flower buds chewed off, and slimy, poop-colored blobs clinging to the outsides.  Few leaves remained on the stalk, already having been devoured by the feces-covered larvae of the Scarlet Lily Beetle  (Lilioceris lilii):

The larvae are the first visible signs of infestation, as they consume first the leaves of the lily and then the buds, covering themselves with their own excrement as protection from the weather as well as predators.  Unfortunately, these beetles have no natural predators or parasites native to the U.S., although there has been some success in reducing beetle populations with the use of biological controls, including the introduction of European species of parasitizing wasps. I doubt very much, though, that those parasitoids have been released at Bog Meadow Brook Nature Trail.  In the eight years since I first discovered this infestation, the Canada Lilies have continued to decline, with only an occasional mature plant struggling to persist, and those solitary survivors producing only one or two flowers, none with the abundant number of flowers per plant I used to find.

I do keep my hopes up, though.  When I visited Bog Meadow Brook Trail in late May this year, I found masses of Canada Lily babies happily growing along the trail, close to the edge of the path.  

Could it be that the Scarlet Lily Beetles have moved on from this location, having so depleted the Canada Lily population here that their pickings would now be slim?  Would any of these many lily sprouts make it to maturity? My hopes were high, since the verges of the path looked so green and delightfully floral as we walked it that day in late May. There were Wild Strawberries then, and Grove Sandworts and Spotted Geraniums and Wood Anemones and Wild Ginger and Sessile Bellworts and many other wildflowers in addition to the Dandelions so visibly starring the trailside grasses in this photo.

Well, those hopes were promptly dashed when I stepped onto this same section of trail yesterday.  Those verdantly floral trailside verges had been mowed to within an inch of the ground.  Not a single wildflower of ANY kind in sight. 

Could any of those lily sprouts have escaped the mower blades?  Yeah, dream on! Not a trace of any lily stems could I find among the mown stalks of every plant that dared to inch closer than four feet from the edge of the hard-surfaced path.

Why this mania for mowing a trail wide enough to accommodate a semi truck? Maybe the lilies got eaten by beetles again, but those trailside verges are rife with other native wildflowers that now will never be seen this year by anyone walking this trail. Couldn't the mowers wait until after frost, when  biennials would have a chance to drop seeds for next year's basal leaves? This is called a "nature trail" after all. There's no HOA to fine anyone for letting the wildflowers grow.  Why does a "nature trail" have to be shorn as short as a lifeless, useless suburban lawn?

No Paddling, But a Fine Walk

Finally! Four months after my total knee replacement surgery, I felt I might be able to lift myself into and out of my solo canoe. It was time to go for a paddle. To test my capability, my pals Sue and Ruth and Bonnie came with me to rescue me should I overestimate my strength or my tolerance for pain. We chose to meet at Archer Vly, a pond with a beautiful wild shoreline up in northern Saratoga County, one that offers easy access for launching our canoes.  

I realize this photo makes the pond look calm and serene.  But that was just for the brief moment of this  picture-taking. Most of the time, the wind was whipping waves up on the water past the shelter of this shore, and with temps only in the 60s and paddling muscles grown lax from all winter's dis-use, we thought better of making today our first paddle of the season. Especially since my exit from my canoe with my untried knee might lead to a dunking in still-cold pondwater.

Lucky for us, the pondside woods offered as many botanical rewards as a paddle along the shore would have done.  And lucky for me, my friends can fill in the gaps in MY botanical knowledge with much expertise that I myself lack, be it birdsong or bryophytes.

Later in the summer, the banks of this pond will be a veritable garden of beautiful wildflowers, and this lovely waterside patch of Blue Flags (Iris versicolor) indicated that the show was off to a good start.

Much more shy of bloom are the yellow florets of Indian Cucumber Root (Medeola virginiana), which dangle beneath the top of two tiers of leaves. These florets will rise through the leaflets to crown the plant with blue-black berries as fall approaches.  We were astounded by the numbers of these native wildflowers we found blooming along the trail today.

If we'd been here last week, I bet that the bracts of Bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) would have been pristine white, not showing the first signs of aging as they did today. Beautiful, nonetheless!

The purple-striped blooms of White Wood Sorrel (Oxalis montana) were at the prime of their beauty, nestled amid their triads of heart-shaped leaves.

It would have been a marvelous sight to see, the dozens of rose-splashed white flowers of Painted Trillium (Trillium undulatum) that bloomed along this trail back in late May.  We could ID this particular trillium even now, by the short petioles that join each of its three leaves to its stalk, as well as by the smooth, oval fruits atop each plant, green now but eventually turning bright red.

Here was another wildflower we found that was in between flowering and fruiting, the yellow lily-like blooms of Clintonia (Clintonia borealis) now faded to yield its unripe berries.  Currently green, these berries will eventually turn the vivid blue that suggested this native plant's alternative name of Blue-bead Lily. The best way to recognize this plant now is by its broad shiny-green untoothed basal leaves that appear to have only a single middle vein.

Here were more smooth green leaves displaying a prominent middle vein, but these were narrower and not at all as leathery as those Clintonia leaves.  This leaf sheathed the single flower stalk near its bottom, and two much smaller leaves sheathed the stem higher up. At this young stage, it would have been hard to guess what the inflorescence would look like, but having in past years seen this Little Green Wood Orchid (Platanthera clavellata) thriving along these banks by the hundreds, it wasn't hard to guess the species.

I was ecstatic to find P. clavellata leaves along the shore this year, since four years ago, deep flooding that rose far into the woods had appeared to have wiped out every single one of these little orchids we used to find growing right at the edge of the water. Until now, I'd not seen another one again along these shores. When I now found this row of leaves emerging from beneath a fallen tree limb higher up on the banks, I pondered how this grouping and location must have happened. That 2021 flooding had occurred in September, after the orchids would have gone to seed.  Did the flood waters carry that seed higher up on the banks, where clusters of seeds might have gotten deposited beneath the shelter of this fallen limb? And only now, four years later, the seeds have produced new plants? Not impossible, do you think?

We found the shrubby young growths of Balsam Firs (Abies balsamea) almost as colorful as any flowers, with the bright yellow-green tufts of new needles decorating every twig. It was hard to resist the urge to pluck a tuft to breathe in its wonderful Christmassy scent. And I didn't resist. Aaah!

Both Sue and Ruth are dedicated "mossers" who could tell at a glance the names of many mosses we found along the trail today.  If they did tell me the name of this pretty one, alas, I've already forgotten it. And I never bothered to suss out the name of the vividly colored mushrooms, either. I was simply delighted by the colors and shapes of this arrangement, content to not need any names to stand between my seeing them and the aesthetic pleasure I took in their beauty.

I did know the name of this fungus, a patch of itty-bitty jelly dots decorating a wettish fallen log, although I did need Sue to jog my memory.  Helicogloea compressa (no common name). Ah yes. That's the name!  They don't get any bigger than this.

Whoa!  I DID know that all this fluffy brown stuff was the Chocolate Tube Slime Mold (although I did have to look up its scientific name: Stemonitus axifera.) But I had never seen such an impressively extensive patch of it.

Here's a closer look at that Chocolate Tube Slime Mold, the better to see all those tiny tubes. There are several similar species that can only be distinguished by microscopic features, but I think they all answer to the vernacular name of Chocolate Tube.

This shiny green stuff strewn with what look like skinny rice noodles reminds me of a similar liverwort I found last year that was called Mueller's Pouchwort (Calypogeia muelleriana).  Is this the same stuff, Sue? (I hope Sue might confirm or not in a comment or email.) Whatever its name, it was just one of the incredibly diverse organisms that surrounded us on every side as we walked around the pond.  Wonderful compensation for losing out on a paddling adventure.

We did not see many insects on our walk today (perhaps the brisk wind impeded their flights), but this one, a Swamp Milkweed Leaf Beetle (Labidomera clivicollis), was chowing down on a Common Milkweed leaf. 

Despite the "swamp" part of its name, this colorful beetle can eat the leaves of any milkweed species. Like many other insects that feed on milkweed, this beetle's bright color advertises the toxicity it acquires from consuming the milkweed and thus discourages predators.  And like some other milkweed eaters, this beetle nips the leaf veins upstream of where it feeds at the edge of the leaves, thus preventing the sticky latex sap from glueing its jaws shut. A bug that's as smart as it is beautiful!

Evelyn Greene, Dear Friend and Cherished Mentor

Stunned by grief, I have found it hard to express my feelings of loss, because my dear mentor and friend, Evelyn Greene, died of cancer on May 27. I know many of my naturalist friends will also grieve her death. Her son David Greene has informed us that Evelyn remained positive, physically and mentally and socially active and relatively pain free until literally the last day of her life, when her hospice nurse helped her passing to be more comfortable. A remarkably smart, funny, generous, deeply knowledgeable, one-of-a-kind kind of gal, I am enormously grateful that she recognized a kindred nature-nut spirit in me and took me under her tutelage about all things nature: plants and birds and "holey boulders" and "frazil ice," to name just a few.  Longtime followers of this blog will recognize Evelyn from the many blogs I posted about our adventures together. My mantra about my friend was "I would follow Evelyn anywhere!" Wherever she led me, the rewards were always amazing, her companionship always delightful.

Evelyn liked this portrait (below) because she told me she was wearing her favorite hat. I wish I could remember the story behind it. Evelyn had LOTS of stories. As the daughter of Paul Schaefer, a foremost advocate for the protection of wilderness in the Adirondacks, she and her siblings were required to climb all the Adirondack high peaks as children (whether they wanted to or not). When I met her in our mutual maturity, she preferred paddling and exploring lower-altitude wild places and had no use for "mindless mountaineering and oblivious hiking." Together, we moved slowly, paid attention, and bowed often. Evelyn is pictured here on the Hudson River shore called the "Ice Meadows," an area she knew very well, becoming a true expert on the often-enormous build-up of a special kind of ice that has created the remarkable habitat along this section of the river north of Warrensburg, N.Y.

These are not snowbanks behind Evelyn, but rather that special kind of ice called "frazil."  Evelyn was known as "the queen of the Hudson River Ice Meadows" because of her expertise regarding this snowy-white ice that forms in turbulent river waters during sub-zero weather. 

Sometimes this frothy-looking (but powerful!) ice will mount up so high it will cover the riverside road to heights of 10 feet or more, pushing over trees in the riverside forest and requiring weeks for road crews to clear passage along the road. The remarkably rich botanical habitat along these shores is  caused by the effects of such massive deposits of ice. Often not melting until nearly June, the weight and freezing temperature of all that ice discourages the intrusion of invasive plant species, preserving this habitat as home to many rare plants, including some that are found nowhere else in the state.

Here, Evelyn stands before an Adirondack boulder that displays a remarkable weathering pattern that has puzzled many geologists: granitic gneiss pocked with very odd holes of different sizes, formations that even the state's chief geologist couldn't explain. 

Thanks to Evelyn's diligent efforts to learn more about them, she eventually found a name to put to them: "tafoni" rock formations. The cause of them is not simply wind or water erosion but probably some kind of weathering process involving the mineral makeup of the rock. The exact cause remains mysterious. This is just one example of Evelyn's always active mind: observations would impel her to find out not only WHAT she observed, but also WHY.

Evelyn and I met because we both had Hornbeck super-lightweight solo canoes we could carry ourselves and paddle alone at the speed most effective for observing natural wonders along waterways: slow and close to the banks, more interested in what we might see of plants and animals there, instead of seeing how fast and far we could go. (That's how we walked together, too, slow and observant of all that lay around us, not giving a hoot about reaching a mountaintop.) Whenever Evelyn invited me on an adventure, I jumped at the chance, for this life-long Adirondack explorer knew of many isolated ponds I would never find on my own. On the day pictured below, we visited three of them: Wakely Pond, Helldiver Pond, and Ice House Pond, all situated in a part of the Adirondack Park called the Moose River Plains, a vast area of state forest accessed by seriously rutted old logging roads and snowmobile trails.  Evelyn had volunteered to monitor all three for the presence of aquatic invasives. Happily, we found none.

Evelyn owned several Hornbeck canoes, which she generously would lend to friends she invited to come along on her adventures.   I believe that was her true mission in life, to share her knowledge of and love for all things natural to as many folks as she could, among those who expressed a similar interest. What a generous mentor she was to all of us! And what a fun companion, whether teaching us about frazil ice or tafoni boulders or birdsong or plants or moss or the rarest liverworts in the country! She loved welcoming neophyte nature explorers under her wing and enlarging our worlds enormously. She certainly recognized that incipient passion for nature in me, and she changed my life. I will miss her as long as I live.

This blog contains at least 40 posts about our nature explorations together, so I am comforted that I can revisit these posts to recall the many ways that Evelyn enriched my life.   These posts can all be visited by typing "Evelyn Greene" into this blog's search bar. Here's the link to just one of those posts, one that I think epitomized the kind of fun and adventure that Evelyn Greene added to my life.