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!