On the Road for Spiranthes ochroleuca

How far would I travel for the chance to find a new flower?  Well, I'm not sure, but on Thursday I sped 50 miles up the Northway to meet my friend Bob Duncan, who told me he could show me some Yellow Nodding Ladies' Tresses (Spiranthes ochroleuca).  And this is not even a rare plant.  Just one I'd never seen before.  Or maybe I had but simply assumed it was common old ordinary Nodding Ladies' Tresses (S. cernua).  They sure look a lot alike.

But Bob (whose judgement I trust) assured me that this was a separate species, one that grows in drier habitats than does S. cernua, and usually blooms just a little bit later.   Here he examines one we found growing along a woodsy back road near Brant Lake.

Bob pointed out the salient characteristics:  the pale yellow cast to the flower's throat, the abruptly curling lower petal, and the sharply upturned curled-back white bracts at the side of the flower.  I would say that it has a very frilly appearance.

Here's a photo of S. cernua for comparison, noting that they are perhaps a little less curly and that their flowers are a purer white, with little or no yellow coloration.   But I would say these two species look very much alike,  and without Bob's guidance I would never have identified S. ochroleuca by myself.

There were other attractions in that Brant Lake woods, among them a number of interesting fungi that had sprung up following Tuesday's heavy rains.  Here, a nice little clump of Yellow Spindle Coral glows in a beam of sunlight.

I couldn't identify these tiny white mushrooms, but I thought they were awfully cute.

It's too bad I didn't find these Black Trumpets when they were fresh, since I've heard they are quite good to eat.  These were too far gone to pick, close to melting into the earth, some of them being consumed by other, smaller fungi.

These big brown-gilled mushrooms were also past their prime, but they still displayed a bulbous stalk circled by red rings that made them readily identifiable as Braceleted Cort (Cortinarius armillatus).

Oops!   Sorry, little fella.  The morning was chilly and this little Red Eft was trying to stay warm beneath the large cap of one of the Braceleted Corts.  We put it back down in the leaf litter and covered it up with the mushroom once again.  I know these juvenile Spotted Newts are so cute that it's hard not to want to hold them,  but the normal acid of our skin can injure their delicate skin, so it's important not to touch them with bare hands.

I Found a New Flower -- and an Airport! -- in North Creek

Who would have thought that a little Adirondack town like North Creek would have its own airport?  I sure didn't, so I was quite surprised when my friend Evelyn Greene (who lives in North Creek) suggested we take a walk there to look for Fringed Gentians.  OK, sure, I said, knowing that whatever Evelyn suggests is bound to be an adventure.  So off we set down a dirt road that led  to this lovely open greensward surrounded by forest and offering a splendid view of nearby Moxham Mountain:  the airport at North Creek.

That airport's green grass landing strip looked more like a golf course than an airport, and it made for a lovely place to walk on a quiet September Sunday afternoon,  when we had to dodge neither incoming aircraft nor errant golf balls.  Evelyn and I were joined there by our friend and fellow wildflower enthusiast, Bob Duncan.

Evelyn seems to know intimately every inch of land surrounding her home for miles, and several years ago she had recognized a patch of dampish soil along the airport's runway as the perfect spot for Fringed Gentians to grow.   So she obtained some seeds and scattered them there among the asters and goldenrods and especially the Bog Lycopodium that had indicated the right soil chemistry for this lovely blue late-summer flower.   The payoff for her efforts was much in evidence today.

The gorgeous New England Asters added their flashes of brilliant color to the unmown edges of the runway.  Although a deep and radiant purple is the expected color of this wildflower's blooms, here and there we saw this aster sporting blooms of an equally deep and radiant rose.

As the wildflower season draws to a close, we nature lovers are grateful for other points of interest along our paths.  A case in point is this sprightly baby White Cedar sprouting up from a patch of Pink Earth Lichen.

Pink Earth Lichen always deserves a down-on-your-knees, nose-to-the-ground closer look to admire its adorable tiny pink fruiting bodies.

Another lichen growing nearby also deserved a closer look to marvel its minute telescoping trumpets.  I'm not sure of the scientific name of this Cladonia species, but I have heard it called Pagoda Lichen.  Update:  Thanks to Bob Duncan, I now do know the scientific name of this lichen:  Cladonia cervicornis var. verticillata.

I did recognize this fluffy gray stuff as Reindeer Lichen, and the perky green tuft is certainly a clubmoss, but one I don't know the name of.  If I do find out, I'll be back to add its ID.  Update:  Another big thanks goes to Bob Duncan, who ID'd this clubmoss as Diphasiastrum tristachyum.  I wonder how I'll be able to remember that?  One of its common names is Blue Ground-cedar, and it does have a bluer cast to its green than other clubmosses that are also called Ground-cedar.

Masses of Sand Jointweed displayed how happy they were to inhabit this sandy trail that led into the woods from the airport runway.

We were striding along this trail toward home when the brilliant orange color of this unknown plant halted us in our tracks.  None of us knew what it was at first, but we did have a Newcomb's Wildflower Guide and its clever key system with us, so it didn't take long to find out that this was Flowering Spurge (Euphorbia corollata), sometimes called Wild Baby's Breath.

A nearby plant with a few flowers remaining clinched the ID, as did the drop of milky white sap oozing from a broken-off stem.  This is not a particularly uncommon plant, but it's one that I had never seen before, so I can now add a new flower to my "lifer" list.

Poor butterfly!  This Viceroy's tattered wings indicate that its life may soon be drawing to an end along with summer's close.  But like the bright leaves of that Flowering Spurge, the butterfly added a spot of brilliant color to the landscape around the airport at North Creek.

Midsummer's Day Madness

Summer arrived today, and with it a day of suffocating heat.  What kind of crazy people would spend a stifling day like today tromping about in a wetland, blazing sun pounding down like a load of hot bricks on our backs, sweat washing the eyeglasses right off our noses?   Well, they don't call us wildflower nuts for nothing!  That's my friend Bob above, a fellow . . .  er, nature enthusiast, who kindly drove me some hours away to a nature preserve known to be home to the incomparable Showy Lady's Slipper (Cypripedium reginae), truly the queen of the Lady's Slippers.

I'm sure that only a fellow orchid enthusiast would understand why we had to get out to this secret spot today, to catch these incredibly beautiful native orchids while they were still in bloom.  I can't think of anything I could say to convince other folks we hadn't lost our minds.  Perhaps a few photos can serve as explanation.

 When we first walked into this wetland, we didn't see a single Lady's Slipper and we began to worry that we had missed their bloom time.  But then Bob let out a yell:  Here's one!  By the time we were done exploring the area, we had counted over a hundred, most in full glorious bloom, a few past their prime, but many more still in bud.  What a day!


Those Lady's Slippers weren't the only orchids we found in there, either.  Small groups of the White Bog Orchis (Habeneria dilatata) were scattered about the wetland,  holding tall spikes of snowy white blooms well above the surrounding greenery.

I had nearly despaired of getting a close-up shot of this orchid's little blooms until Bob pulled out a white folding screen and held it behind the flower spike.  At last my camera decided to focus on the flower instead of all the grasses beyond it.

Update:  Got a note from a blog reader asking if I had noticed the crab spider lurking among the florets.  I had not, but I do now!  Can you see it up there on the top right?


We were truly startled to find this single Grass Pink (Calopogon tuberosus) in bloom, since another bog where we know these bright pink orchids grow abundantly has shown no sign of them as yet.  

Finding that Grass Pink made it a three-orchid day, enough to satisfy the very nuttiest of nature nuts.  But what really crowned the day was discovering this little patch of Pink Pyrola (Pyrola asarifolia), a flower that's at least as rare in New York as the Showy Lady's Slippers.   We owe this find to a group of orchid enthusiasts who entered the preserve while we were just leaving and pointed  this lovely little flower out to us.

There were many butterflies flitting about the wetland, but none would sit still for a photo.  But never mind.  This baby butterfly did, and it's almost as pretty as its adult form, the Baltimore Checkerspot Butterfly, will be.

Another Day, Another Rare Orchid

I just can't believe my good fortune!  I got to lay eyes on two of New York's rarest orchids in just the past two days.  Yesterday, my friend Evelyn Greene escorted me to a secret pond to see those Arethusas, and today, Evelyn's friend Bob Duncan escorted me on a secret trail to find an even rarer orchid, the Hooker's Orchis (Platanthera hookeri).  And it wasn't even hard to get to the site, although we did have to balance carefully across a beaver dam or two and scramble over some blowdown.

Actually, I was grateful to find those trees across the trail, since it made the trail temporarily inaccessible to such motorized vehicles as snowmobiles and ATVs, which had been driving right over this patch of rare orchids before Evelyn Greene convinced New York's conservation department to re-route the trail.  I'm sure the motorists never noticed the orchids as they rode over them, since they're hard enough to see even when you are searching for them, well camouflaged as they are by their green coloration.

So what's so remarkable about such a plain-colored plant?  For one thing, this endangered species is becoming increasingly rare, with only two populations currently known in all of New York State, according to what I read on the New York Natural Heritage website.  Also, the USDA plant information site lists this plant as threatened, endangered, or extirpated in nearly all the states surrounding New York.  So the chance of ever finding one is almost impossible, if you don't know where to look.  And then, of course, the flowers are actually quite interesting, although much easier to see with your eyes than they are to photograph.

We had to use all kinds of tricks to get our automatic-focus cameras to focus on the flowers and not the forest floor behind them.  And I finally gave up trying to capture both flower spikes and leaves in the same photograph.

Placing a hand behind often works to bring the flower into focus.  I definitely wanted to capture the long spurs and sharply curving lips that distinguish this orchid.  I guess it's appropriate that a flower called Hooker's should display a blossom with hooks like these -- although the plant got its name from a 19th-century English gardener named William Hooker, not from the shape of its flowers.

What luck, that my camera actually cooperated to focus on the convoluted structure of the flower's interior.

After spending a good long while admiring our orchids and attempting to photograph them, we continued our hike to the shore of an isolated pond (which shall remain nameless), where we sat to enjoy a picnic lunch.

While exploring the shore of the pond, Bob noticed this dragonfly clinging to the bark of a tree.  I wonder if it was very recently emerged from the nymph, since it made no attempt to fly away when I came near with my camera lens.  Such a pretty pink color! Will it change as the dragonfly matures?  Any guesses as to its species?   Update:  Bob sent a note suggesting this might be an immature Chalky Corporal.  There sure were lots of them flying around the pond.