My Own Woodland Wonderland

No exotic landscapes, no amazing animal antics, no adventures worth a write-up in National Geographic -- it was just a simple walk in the woods on a crisp and lovely late-autumn afternoon that filled me with joy today.  It sure doesn't take much to make me happy.  And happy, indeed, I was,  to abandon my pre-holiday preparations at home and set out for Mud Pond at Moreau Lake State Park, to walk the trail that circles the pond, which today lay serene and calm under a clear blue sky.

I could hear the Hooded Mergansers out on the pond, their low rumbling croaks, as two males, bobbing their heads and arching their necks,  showed off their splendid black-and-white headdresses to a pair of females floating on the mirror-like surface of the pond.  I could barely see them, however, nor could my camera capture them with its limited zoom capability, but I know they are there in the center of this photo, because their calls are unmistakeable.  Click HERE to hear that amazing sound and see this duck's beautiful plumage.

The water level of the pond was remarkably low today, revealing extensive mud flats on the western shore.  A wash of bright green overlying the dark mud made me wonder if some new plants were growing there so late in the season.

Oh my gosh, there sure were!  Here's the liverwort Ricciocarpus natans, masses of it almost completely covering the shore.  I found this liverwort at this same location two years ago, but it then disappeared, and I have been searching for it ever since.  There was not a trace of it here all summer and early fall this year, but here it was again, in multitudes.  It's considered to be a floating plant, so my question is:  Does it form in the water and then get stranded on the mud when the water level drops, or does it form first on the mud and then float away in the spring when the water levels rise?

Further back on the shore of the mud flats, it was easy to spot the rusty-orange clusters of Ditch Stonecrop among the pale blades of dead grass.

The plump five-parted seedheads deserve a closer look to enjoy their intricate beauty.

Along the powerline clearcut at the northern end of the pond, a number of American Hazelnut shrubs still held frilly clusters of ripe nuts.   How is it the squirrels haven't devoured these nuts or stored them away in their winter caches?  Perhaps they are wormy or moldy.  Even if they are, I thought they looked quite handsome.

The sandy trail along the powerline is perfect habitat for the Mint-family plant called Blue Curls, which, in season, bears pretty little royal-blue flowers.  After the flowers drop, I find delight in the dainty seed capsules, each little cup holding two round seeds, like tiny eggs in miniature baskets.  I was surprised to see a few seeds remaining.

The little asters are long past blooming, but many still hold their puffy white seed heads, which I find kind of adorable, like little furry creatures.

With November's palette of browns and grays dominating the landscape now, it's always a pleasant surprise to see a little jolt of color like this baby oak leaf, still holding on to autumn's more brilliant hues.

And here's a promise of spring:  the male catkins of Sweet Fern are already present, clustered at the ends of the shrubby stems.  They will stay tightly closed all winter,  waiting until spring's warmth to open their scales and shed their pollen on the air, to waft to waiting female flowers.

As the sun fell lower in the sky, it shed a golden light on the banks of Mud Pond and lit up the white breasts of a small flock of Canada Geese resting on the still surface of the water.

I took the river road home, stopping to stand on the banks and gaze on the beauty of my beloved Hudson as it meanders among the mountains.  There was not a whisper of wind to riffle the reflections of forested hills and rocky islands.

I could not tell if my photos were in focus, since my eyes kept blurring with tears of gratefulness and joy that a landscape of such transcendent  loveliness was mine to inhabit.

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Mushroom Hunting at Moreau

In my post for last Saturday, I pictured a fungus -- Cordyceps capitata -- that turned out to be a rather rare species that only grows on underground truffles.  Intrigued by this information and wanting to see these remarkable fungi in situ, I set out on Sunday to see if I could find the spot where the fellows found them while clearing a new trail in Moreau Lake State Park.  Well, I walked that entire trail, both the old and the new parts, and could not for the life of me find them.  I sure had a nice walk though.  The trails through those Warren County woods are certainly lovely.

But I didn't give up.  Today (Tuesday) I called the park's manager, Peter Iskenderian, to ask him to show me on a trail map exactly where he had found those fungi, and he actually went me one better.  He offered to escort me to the very site in person.  So off we went together, on a radiantly lovely brisk autumn afternoon, striding along a trail that followed the Hudson, which was visible through the trees and sparkling in the sun.

Peter led me directly to the site, and there they were, a cluster of Cordyceps capitata, rather mangled by being raked by trail workers, but recognizable all the same, with their worm-like yellow stalks crowned with brownish bonnets.

I was particularly interested to find the truffle-like fungus, Elaphomyces, which grows underground and is a necessary concomitant for the presence of Cordyceps capitata.   When we dug out the soil beneath the visible Cordyceps, we not only found the truffles, we found other hidden Cordyceps, curled up underground.

Very fragile, the Cordyceps broke from the truffle at a touch, but here in my hand are the two fungi arranged as I found them before they broke apart.  That rough brown ball is not the root of the Cordyceps, but is instead the separate truffle-like fungus Elaphomyces.

I sliced one of the truffles open to reveal its black interior.  Unlike the extremely valuable edible truffles, this one had no discernible odor.  Nor should it ever be eaten.  I don't know if it is poisonous, but it is not considered to be edible.

These weren't the only interesting fungi I encountered along Moreau trails this past week.  Last Friday, my friend Sue and I found several more on a very pleasant walk around Moreau Lake, which, despite the gloomy weather, offered a serene and lovely reflection of a low gray sky.

A light misty rain had stopped before we set out along the shore, but the raindrops were still in evidence on the backs of fallen oak leaves.  I'm noticing now, as I look at this photo again, that the drops were beaded up like this only on the undersides of the leaves.  I must look very closely with my hand lens next time I pick up an oak leaf, to see how the textures differ from the upper and under sides of the the leaves.  (For the moment, though, I will just enjoy the beauty of this leaf.)

We always find Turkeytail fungus on our walks through Moreau woods, and I thought this arrangement of older and newer fungi, plus lichens, moss, bark and leaves, was particularly colorful.

Sue and I were mystified by this patch of white stuff spreading across the surface of an oak stump cut level with the ground.  It had covered not only the oak wood, but also a number of acorns resting there, as well as several other little white-capped gilled mushrooms that had sprouted from the same wood.

At first I thought it might be a slime mold, and it may yet be, but after taking a closer look at the ruffly structure of the growth, I thought it looked  more like a fungus than a slime mold.  I hope to get an answer soon from my mushroom-expert friends.

Update:  This IS a slime mold!  I found a photo of it in George Barron's Mushrooms of Northeast North America, which has a nice section on slime molds.  Its name is Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa var. porioides.


There was no wondering what THIS fungus was!  This is a Ravenel's Stinkhorn (Phallus ravenelii), with a shape that matches its Latin name, and a stink that attracted a bunch of red-eyed flies.

Copulating red-eyed flies, at that.

New Trail at Moreau Lake State Park

What better way to spend National Trails Day, November 3, than helping to mark and groom a new trail in Moreau Lake State Park?  For a number of years now, the park has owned extensive lands on the Warren County side of the Hudson River, but hiking options over there have been rather limited, since only a single trail had been marked and mapped to date.  Today we laid another trail, one that will give much better access to river views than the one that existed already, which runs almost entirely through deep woods.  In the photo above, the guys are setting out with axes and chain saws to remove small trees and fallen logs that obstruct the new trail, while a group of us women started clearing the path of fallen leaves and small limbs, making it easier for hikers to follow.


In the process of raking leaves from the trail, we uncovered this group of Downy Rattlesnake Plantain plants,  one of New York's many species of native orchids, which will bear spikes of very small white flowers next August.  The beautifully patterned leaves will stay green all winter, and to protect them from damage lest we have another snowless winter this year,  I covered them again with the leaves we had raked away.

 I hope to find many other interesting plants along this new section of trail, since it runs through rich woods that have a calcareous substrate, essential for certain plants that require lime-rich soils to thrive.  On other occasions, we have found the lovely pink-and-white Showy Orchids growing in this same area.


The portion of the new trail we worked on today leads directly down to the Hudson, coming out onto the river banks a short distance above Spier Falls Dam.  The land here flattens out into open sunny woods, which should make for a wonderful destination for picnickers.

One of the most interesting features of this new trail are the ruins of old dwellings that remain in the woods, evidence of the early settlers who once farmed the lands along these banks.  Although the portion of the trail we worked on today ended at the location pictured here,  further work will continue the trail upstream along the river to where it will connect with the trail that had been cut in previous years.

While the men were working with pickaxes and chainsaws to clear a hillside, they came upon a cluster of odd-looking mushrooms that nobody recognized.  I was grateful that they thought of me and brought a couple of specimens back to see if I could identify them.  Well, I certainly could not.  They are like nothing I have seen before, either in my woodland travels or in my several mushroom books.

What looked at first glance to be closed caps at the top turned out to not be caps at all, but rather bulbous swellings covered with a brownish crust that was composed of tiny tubes, a crust that flaked off quite easily.  Very unusual, indeed!  I will send photos to mushroom experts I know, and hope that they will be able to give a name to this fascinating little fungus.

Update:  Big thanks go out to mycologist Sue Van Hook, who identified this fungus as Cordyceps capitata, a quite rare fungus that grows on the underground truffle-like fungus Elaphomyces.  When I looked up this species in my Augubon mushroom guide, I discovered that, although neither fungus is known to be edible, the Cordyceps has been used by Mexican shamans to divine the future, and the Elaphomyces has been used by some Europeans and Asians as an aphrodisiac.

Moreau's Many Marvelous Options

These are the days we hikers wait for all year. The air is crisp and cold in the morning, with a warming sun that coaxes us to shed our jackets by noon.  The woods are ablaze with red and gold, and the paths are covered with fallen leaves that release a sweet oaken fragrance as we hike along, neither bothered by bugs nor sticky with sweat.  And, oh, what options we have for autumn walks at Moreau Lake State Park!  If one route doesn't work out, there are many more trails to choose from.

Sue and I had planned to hike the Palmertown Mountain Ridge in the park, so we met this morning at the summit trailhead near a powerline clearcut.  But it didn't take long for us to change our plans. The parking lot was filled with pickup trucks, a sign that many hunters were up in the mountains today.  Then a gunshot booming from not far away clinched the decision for us.  Let's choose a trail somewhere in the park where we're sure we won't get shot at.  And we had an embarrassment of riches to choose from, with over 4000 acres of forest, mountains, lake, ponds, streams, and riverbanks awaiting our explorations.

First, though, we did explore the powerline clearcut a while, delighting in the rich variety of mosses and lichens that carpet the boulders here.  Low Blueberry bushes, their bright-red leaves lit up by the morning sun, glowed as if they were on fire.

Masses of Pale Corydalis had found a niche in the cracks of some boulders, their lacy blue-green foliage sparkling with dew.

While much of Moreau Lake State Park is open to hunters, the trails around the lake and close to the camping sites are considered a safety zone, so that's where Sue and I decided to hike.   We chose the Red Oak Ridge Trail, which runs midway up the mountains that stand on the western side of the lake.

It was on this trail that we earlier found the tiny orchid called Autumn Coralroot, so we searched to see if we could find it again.  And wonder of wonders, so we did! It sure would have been hard to see if we hadn't known exactly where to look.

This little mushroom, although very small (see the Hickory nut shell behind it), was easy to spot because of its luminous yellow color.

The same could be said for these blazing red mushrooms, the largest of which was only a little bigger than a pea.

More little mushrooms and a couple of golden Bigtooth Aspen leaves.

Several little streams tumble down the mountain to cross the Red Oak Ridge Trail, most of them reduced to only a trickle this time of year.  But this one actually contained enough water to splash and shimmer along its way.
 

We lingered a while to enjoy its lively music and enchanting reflections.

Near the stream we found this moss-covered log adorned with clusters of Wolf's Milk slime mold, which is peachy pink when young but turns gray like the clump on the right as it ages.

Sue had to leave for work by noon, but I lingered on, reluctant to leave the woods on this glorious day, and headed next to Mud Pond, another beautiful area of Moreau Lake State Park.

Sue had told me about a cluster of Pinesap she'd seen, dressed in its autumn scarlet, that stood along one of our "secret" trails, so I went to see if I could find it.  And I did.  How could I miss it, lit by a ray of sun and glowing in the dark woods?

This little Red Maple didn't need to be lit by the sun to glow in the woods.

Witch Hazel was fully unfurled today, and I pressed my nose into its flowers to breathe in its delicious fragrance, very subtle, slightly sweet and faintly citrus, reminiscent of clean laundry that's been dried outside in the sun.

There were still more areas of the park to explore, and more hours of the day left to do so, so I headed next to Spier Falls Road to walk along the Hudson River.

WOW!  Most of our Red Maples have wimped out this fall, dropping their shriveled and browning leaves before  turning their customary glorious red, but here was one that was living up to its reputation for autumn splendor.

And here was another, backlit by a lowering sun, leaning over the calm blue river.

Instead of taking the highway home, I chose Old Saratoga Road, a  scenic route through fields and forests and mountains.  As I stopped to marvel at this mountainside ablaze with chrysanthemum colors, I recalled that Moreau Lake State Park was in the process of acquiring this very tract.  Imagine!  There will someday be even more trails, cut through these beautiful mountainous woods, providing ever more options for hikers and hunters alike.