No Fungi Today

I had thought, what with all the rain we've had this week, that the Skidmore Woods would be teeming with mushrooms today.  I went out there, dreaming of a big fat King Bolete to slice and fry up in butter, or maybe a giant heap of Hen of the Woods to stew up in a soup and fill my kitchen with the fragrance of the forest.  But no such luck.  I walked and walked the woodsy trails, getting drenched in a pouring rain, but not a single mushroom did I find, of any kind, either edible or deadly poisonous.
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Ah, but I did find a slime mold!  How could anyone miss this blaze of bright orange, a mass of tiny shiny balls covering the underside of a well-rotted log?

Of course, I didn't know for sure that this was a slime mold, so I broke off a little piece to bring home, where I found its look-alike in both my Audubon's mushroom guide and George Barron's Mushrooms of Northeast North America.  There I learned that these are the young fruitbodies of some member of the Hemitrichia genus that can't be positively identified as to species until it matures.

Although slime molds are usually included in guide books for fungi, they aren't fungi at all, but rather a kind of organism that doesn't fit easily into our biological classification system.  At an early stage of their lives they move freely about, eating and digesting and eliminating as animals do.  Then, at a later stage, they behave more like fungi, producing fruitbodies that contain spores, which are then dispersed by the wind.

I learned about slime molds mostly from Barron's book, which has a very informative chapter on this fascinating organism.  I'm planning to take that book with me tomorrow, along with my Newcomb's and my Beachcomber's Botany guide, when my husband and I head out to Montauk, on the furthest end of Long Island, for a little holiday at the seashore.  I won't be able to blog from out there, nor from up in the no-wi-fi regions of the Adirondacks, where I'll be spending Columbus Day weekend at Pyramid Lake.  So I'll be gone from my blog for over a week.   But I hope to have lots of wonders to report when I return.

A Nature Stop Close to Home

On Tuesdays, I work all morning at a Hospice home (starting at 6:45am) and then need a nap after lunch.  Since that doesn't leave much time for extended nature adventures, Tuesdays become good days for short hops to nature sites close to home.  Today I went out to the Skidmore Woods on the north side of Daniels Road, where I'd hoped to find a large group of Wild Bergamot in bloom.  Maybe I'd catch a Hummingbird Moth or a Monarch Butterfly feeding on the pale lavender flowers.

Well, I should have gone looking for Wild Bergamot last week.  They looked pretty spent today, even though they still held onto a few of the raggedy flowers.

The Round-leaved Dogwood berries, however, were at their peak of beauty: pale blue, green, and white orbs held atop hot-pink pedicels.  I think white is the color of the ripest berries, but I rarely see a cluster of all whites, since the birds devour them well before all ripen.

I know many people think of Pokeweed as a big coarse plant, but I find the curving berry stalks very  attractive.  I also like to see the progression of ripening as the berries form. When fully ripe, the berries will be a deep purple-black and the stalks a vivid knock-your-eye-out pink.

I kept searching the tops of Queen Anne's Lace, hoping to catch some Jagged Ambush Bugs in predatory action.  No Ambush Bugs today, but I did find this Goldenrod Crab Spider poised for battle.

I was struck by how this spent flower head of Queen Anne's Lace formed a marvelously intricate basketwork.  So lovely!

Every time I pass a patch of Common Milkweed, I search among its leaves, hoping to find an exquisite Monarch Butterfly chrysalis.  No chrysalis today, but I did find an early instar of the caterpillar that will eventually turn into one.

This dragonfly with the big opalescent eyes kept returning to the same perch again and again, allowing me to inch closer each time and finally capture the color of those marvelous blue-green-purple eyes.  I also was able to note that the stigmas on the fore and rear wings were of different colors.   I haven't yet figured out which species of dragonfly this is.  Maybe some of my readers will know.

Update: As one of my readers named Annie suggests in her comment, this is probably a Blue Dasher.   I know of no other dragonfly with such huge blue eyes and white face that has a brown and yellow striped thorax.  My confusion remains, however, because if this were a male, his abdomen would be blue, and it it were a female (which does have parallel yellow stripes along her abdomen), her eyes would be brown.  But then, I did see some internet photos of what were labeled as Blue Dasher females with blue eyes.  Perhaps this is an immature male, before his abdomen turns blue.  I didn't find any photos of ANY species of dragonfly that had different colored stigmas on the front and rear wings.  By the way, I do have a photo of a Blue Dasher among the column of small photos on the right side of this blog.  The face sure looks the same as this one's.

Time to Catch Up on a Busy Nature Week

Oh lovely Spring!  She offers so many wonders to a naturalist, it's hard to keep up with all she has to display.  I've been so busy with woodswalks this past week or so, I haven't found time to post blogs about my adventures.  And today, another beautiful day is beckoning me to set forth once again, so I want to quickly put up this brief survey of some of the past week's activities, just for the record. 

Amazing Boulders Near Snowy Mountain

 Evelyn Greene (blue backpack, below) not only knows some of the most wondrous spots in the mountains, but she's also eager to share her discoveries with her friends.  On May 3 she led a group of us up the trails of Snowy Mountain near Indian Lake to lay our eyes on some really strange and amazing boulders.

We didn't have to climb all the way to the top of the mountain, because these huge, hollowed-out boulders had likely tumbled down from cliffs above to rest on the lower slopes, more easily accessible on an afternoon's hike.

 Composed of granitic gneiss, the boulders -- called tafoni, a word meaning "windows" in Corsican -- were hollowed out with typical honeycombed pits by various processes, including chemical weathering and mineral hydration.  Typically, these kinds of boulders are found near seashores or deserts, where salt spray or high winds contribute greatly to the weatherization process. Finding these boulders in the middle of an Adirondack forest adds to their mystery.

Acres and acres of blooming Trout Lilies certainly added to the pleasure of our hike up to see those boulders.

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A Wooded Trail Along the Hudson

Evelyn next invited me to join her on a woodland trail that starts near the Thurman Bridge outside Warrensburg.  It was a beautiful blue-sky day this Wednesday to walk along a blue and beautiful Hudson.

We had once walked this trail in early winter to explore its possibilities for cross-country skiing, but today we walked in search of what spring ephemerals might be blooming.  We found the usual denizens of a mixed-hardwood forest like this, while enjoying the extraordinary beauty of sunlight filtering through translucent early green leaves.

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Thursday Group Explores Moreau Shores

 The group of wonderfully knowledgeable folks called the Thursday Naturalists invited my friend Sue and me to lead them around the shores of Moreau Lake this week.   At first, we worried a bit that our friends might find little to fascinate them in this lakeside habitat,  but after it took at least a half-hour to walk a hundred yards, we realized how baseless were our fears.  Every five minutes found us down on our knees or pulling down branches to peer at  one plant or shrub after another, with lively discussions concerning the distinguishing features of each specimen.

Not all of our wondrous discoveries were botanical, however.  Thanks to Sue's eagle eyes, we were witness to the emergence of many dragonflies from their nymphs that were clinging to shoreside plants.

And this mama spider came scurrying by, hauling her teal-blue egg sac.  Wow!

We had all seen Trailing Arbutus many times, but few of us had ever seen the plant's tiny fur-covered fruits.  They reminded me of the coconut-covered candy apples I used to see at county fairs.
 

The blooming Pitch Pines along the beach gave us the opportunity to learn more about this tree's reproduction process, thanks to Ruth Schottman's expert explication.   She pointed out the knot of male (pollen-bearing) flowers here clustered around the base of a new-needle spike.

We next searched and searched through the boughs and finally found a few tiny red-tipped female flowers.  After pollination from the male flowers, these female structures are what will produce the cones.

We also found little developing cones, which Ruth informed us were yearling cones, having been formed a year ago.  Pitch Pines, she explained, will hold onto even mature cones for many years.

So I sure leaned something new about Pitch Pines on our excursion.  I also found something new that day.  As I crossed the parking lot toward my car to go home, I noticed a patch of flowering grass that looked just a little different than any I had seen before.   I passed a piece around to the members of our group, and none of them had seen it before, either.  But then, none of us pretends to be an expert on graminoids.

 So I sent a photo to Steve Young, chief botanist for the New York Natural Heritage Program, and he told me this is Poa bulbosa, an introduced bulbous bluegrass that had not yet been reported as far north as Saratoga County.  He also told me that it was considered invasive and that I should pull it up wherever I find it.  Now, if I can only find it again!

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 Garden Club Tours Skidmore Woods

 Friday morning dawned bright and beautiful, perfect for leading a group of garden-club members through the North Woods of Skidmore College.  Organized by Martha Van Patten of Saratoga Springs, the outing attracted garden-club members from as far away as Indian Lake.  I was also delighted to have noted botanist Ruth Schottman (red coat) and her husband Tom along, to bolster me wherever my botanical knowledge might be wanting.

The Skidmore woods, with its limestone substrate, never fails to deliver many plants of remarkable interest, so I was able to show these lively and interested participants some flowers they had never or seldom seen before, such as Green Violet, Orange-fruited Horse Gentian, and Wood Betony.   I also took the opportunity to encourage these expert gardeners to consider replacing exotics in their gardens with some of the many native plants available at wildflower nurseries.  Happily, the Canada Mayflower was coming into bloom, to demonstrate what a lovely groundcover it could provide in any home garden.

Fringed Polygala was also putting on quite a display, carpeting areas of woods with amazingly intense color.

No doubt the star of the show, however, was the exquisite Yellow Lady's Slipper.  We found several isolated specimens along our walk, thanks to the acute eyesight of some of our group, who spied them blooming off in the woods far from the path. 

 Ruth told us about a botanist who had painstakingly pollinated a group of these lady's slippers in order to have them produce seed heads, which they then did.  But after producing those seed heads, the plants did not bloom again, sometimes not even growing leaves, for several years.  So maybe it's a good thing that we found these lovely flowers so isolated from one another.



I had hoped to show our group the Squaw Root that I always found sprouting beneath a certain oak tree, but it wasn't yet to be seen.  And then I turned around and discovered this intriguing plant sprouting up in a different site.  I had never before seen it in this cute "button" stage.

We were also treated to many animal presences along the way, including a number of butterflies, much exquisite birdsong, and several Garter Snakes, so sinuously lovely among the leaves.

Some of the rarest plants in the Skidmore woods I did not show to my visitors, because they are so sought-after by herbalists that they are in danger of being extirpated.  So I keep their locations a secret.  Goldenseal is one of these plants, and after I said good-bye to the group, I sneaked off to check on the state of one patch that I knew of.  I was happy to find it in very good health, possibly because I have weeded out the Garlic Mustard that several years ago threatened to overwhelm the site where it grows.

Returning to my car along a rocky, moss-covered ledge, I found many plants of Herb Robert, a wild geranium with a beautifully lacy foliage and pretty pink flowers.  Too bad I didn't have a chance to show these plants to the garden-club ladies.  But I'll bet many of them already grow them in their rock gardens.  I sure would, if I had a rock garden.  But hey, come to think of it, I do.  And I don't have to lift a finger to cultivate it.

Woods Walks and Tree Counts

Where did this week go?  Every day was filled with one nature adventure after another, and the week to come looks to be just as busy.  Let me just touch on some of the highlights of the week just past before future events push them back into the dim regions of my memory.

Wednesday morning found me up in Glens Falls with my friend Sue, walking in Cole's Woods, a delightfully woodsy forest right in the middle of the city.

While we followed a pretty creek that wound through the woods, we were serenaded by a Winter Wren flitting about the creek bank and Pine Warblers chattering high in the pines.  There were many wildflowers blooming in the woods, including Red Trilliums, Dog and Northern WhiteViolets, Wood Anemones, and more Dwarf Ginseng than I have ever seen in all my life, starring the ground like a firmament between clouds of Skunk Cabbage leaves.

Thursday brought further woodsy adventures with the botanically inclined group of friends who call themselves the Thursday Naturalists, this week to explore the North Woods of Skidmore College.

 Among the unexpected delights we found were the pristine white flowers of the Large-flowered White Trillium, which will carpet large areas of the Skidmore woods with masses of bloom in the coming weeks.  We were quite surprised to see these this week, since their bloom time is usually later than that of the Red Trillium, which is also just coming into bloom itself.

That was also the case with Large-flowered Bellwort.  We found this showy yellow bellwort beginning to bloom this week at the same time as the Sessile Bellwort, the two usually blooming several weeks apart, with the Sessile Bellwort opening first. 

My friend Sue was the first to spot these fluffy tufts of bloom, so vividly yellow against the clear blue sky.  I would probably have assumed they were just clusters of opening leaves, but Sue has very sharp vision (aided by binoculars) and could see from quite some distance away that these were indeed flowers and not leaves.

A closer inspection revealed the pretty yellow staminate flowers of Sassafras. I wish I had a magnifying lens on my camera to show what one of the botanists in our group, Ruth Schottman, showed to me, the tiny caps on the ends of the stamens that had opened to release the pollen.

I don't know which one of our group spotted this Grey Tree Frog, which looked like a licheny stone lying on the forest floor.   It was quite a surprise to find one down on the ground, since these frogs spend most of their lives in the treetops, rarely descending except to find mates.  It was remarkably docile, allowing us to  poke our cameras at it from very close as well as from all angles.  It even allowed us to pick it up and place it on a green leaf to see if it would green-up to match its background, as these frogs are known to do.  But we detected no change in coloration.  I have read that the change happens quite slowly, compared with chameleons.

We did, however, notice this startling flash of orange under the rear leg of the frog, a color signal that is visible only when the frog is hopping.

We found many other things of interest in the woods that day, but I would say that this dear little frog was definitely the highlight.



Friday, another lovely spring day with temperatures climbing into the 70s, found me picnicking on the sandy shore of Lake Moreau with my friends Sue and Lindsey.  Lindsey is an expert birder who will be leaving next week to do ornithological research for the summer in Mississippi, so Sue planned this picnic to give Lindsey a good dose of northern woodlands before she departed for the steamy south.

Nature certainly cooperated to make the day memorable, for in addition to providing an exquisitely fine day, she sent several critters to entertain us as we sat on the beach.  The first surprise was a muskrat swimming out from shore and when it got directly before our line of sight, it arched its back, poked its nose upwards, and stuck its skinny little tail straight up and proceeded to swim back and forth in that odd posture.  What do you suppose this display could mean?  Is it possibly a part of mating behavior?

Other entertainers included hawks and vultures soaring overhead and a beautiful loon swimming on the lake right before our eyes.  Too bad my camera can't capture birds as far away as these were, but I did manage to get a shot of this lovely American Painted Lady, who landed on the sand beside our blanket.  And posed quite nicely, wasn't that considerate of it?

After our picnic, we walked around the lake, admiring the many beauties that were set before us, such as these baby Red Maple seeds colored a vivid red . . .

. . . and this tiny little Ovate-leaved Violet, as vividly purple as it was adorably diminutive.

We didn't make it completely around the lake because we spent quite a while lingering along the shore of the back bay, listening to the shrill trills of mating American Toads, as well as sitting by a still woodland pool, watching the round eyeballs of toads emerge from the murky water, sometimes in tandem from mating pairs.  My shots of the toads were too blurry to post here, but I did manage to capture the sound of their mating calls in this brief video.  (I couldn't photograph the Snapping Turtle, either, the one Sue tells us about in this video.)

 Saturday was supposed to rain, and so it did, but not until this afternoon, after this group of tree-loving volunteers had completed much of their assignments surveying the street trees of Saratoga Springs.  After gathering for a group photo in the shade of one of Saratoga's few remaining American Elms, we fanned out two-by-two across the city, clipboards, measuring tapes, and GPS devices in hand to conduct a street tree inventory as part of the Saratoga Springs Urban Forestry Project.  This is a project designed to promote awareness of the desirability of large trees in the urban landscape, as well as to argue for the use of native versus introduced, often invasive, species of trees.

My assignment completed, I was walking home when I stopped to admire the flowering crabapple trees lining the front walk of the public library in downtown Saratoga Springs.  I was curious to see if I could find the multiple pistils that distinguish the multi-seeded fruits such as apples and pears from the single-pistillate blossoms of stone fruits like cherries and plums, and sure enough, there they were, those three little green stalks surrounded by the yellow anthers.

Compared to those showy apple blossoms, these tiny Thyme-leaved Sandworts, growing against a stone gutter on a city street, are virtually invisible.  Most folks would never see these little weeds, but then, most folks aren't wildflower nerds like me, who doubtless startled some bystanders when I dropped to my knees to peer closely at these minute little bits of floral prettyness.

I took a brief detour into Congress Park before I got home, eager to see if other of my favorite lawn weeds had come into bloom, to catch sight of them and admire them before the mowers came along to "tidy up" the patches of damp ground where they grow abundantly.  Oh yes, yes, yes!  Some of my most favorite of the mustard-family flowers were blooming today, the dainty white Cuckoo Flowers, so exquisitely lovely with their pink buds, especially when set among masses of beautifully blue Ground Ivy.

And again, yes, yes, yes!   Clustered prettily against the trunk of a tree and protected from the mowers by the tree's roots, was the showiest of our native chickweeds, the Field Chickweed, with flowers nearly an inch across.