Misty River

A soft, warm day with intermittent sun and showers: perfect for misty conditions on the river.  I call this island Woodcock Island because I've flushed a woodcock here several times.  It's a favorite spot for a picnic and swim, and in May it's ablaze with sweet-scented mountain azalea.  Trailing arbutus grows here, too, and so do cardinal flower and narrow-leaved gentian.  It's simply a beautiful spot whatever the season.  Including today.

Today, the easiest way through the woods was to walk along (or in) the beds of streams.  My boots got a little muddy but it spared my shins from being skinned on the crusty snow when my feet punched through.  I found lots more green stuff newly freed from the weight of winter snow: Christmas fern, wood fern, yellow-flowered grass, common speedwell,  partridge berry, horsetail rush, lycopodia, liverwort.  (Which I like to call "lizardwort."  Doesn't this photo  look  sort of like a pile of writhing lizards?) 

And here it is, folks, the first flower of spring: skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus).  The spathe has opened, the spadix inside is dotted with puffs of pollen.  I opened one up for a closer look and spilled what looked like yellow flour all over my front.  With this plant in bloom I can now start a brand new notebook for the year: Wildflowers 2009.

One Intact Tupelo

A lone black tupelo (the smaller trunk) remains ungirdled by beavers

Three balmy days in a row have softened the snowpack.  My snowshoes punch through, making a hike exhausting.  So I went to Moreau Lake to walk on the beach. The lake normally has a nice sandy beach, very pleasant to walk on.  No beach today.  Ice all the way up to the woods, and the ice near shore has turned to mush.  But about ten feet out it was still firm, so I walked out there.  I figured that even if I went through, it was maybe shin deep.  Big deal.  Wet feet.  So what. 

I wanted to visit a place on the far shore where a lone black tupelo grows, to see if it had escaped being girdled by beavers.  The tree grows in a marshy area that's usually hard to get to, but I thought it would be easy to approach it on ice.  And it was.  I could see it fine, it's distinctive sloping branches spiked with short twigs.  But phragmites obscured the base of its trunk from view.  Okay, I thought, I'll just wade through some ankle-deep water there and get up on shore.  I headed in and flooomp!  Right up to my waist in ice water.  Stinky-poo mucky marsh water with icky marsh mud underfoot.  I slogged ashore and sat dripping on the  sunny bank.  Dang! I thought. It's at least a mile to my car. Oh well.  At least my camera's okay. There was no one to see, so I stripped to my undies and wrung the water out of my corduroy pants and my polar fleece socks and the felt liners to my rubber boots and warmed myself in the sun.  The bank was bare of snow, the oak leaves littering the ground were crispy dry.  Mmmm.  So nice.  And I'm still alive to enjoy it.

The worst part of the whole adventure was pulling those cold wet clothes back on.   And the best part (aside from not drowning) was that I found that tupelo trunk unscathed.  Hooray!                                                

Musings and Monuments

"The Spirit of Life" by Daniel Chester French stands in Saratoga's Congress Park

Another lovely balmy day.  Chores kept me out of the woods, but I did take a turn around Congress Park.  There's a big patch of coltsfoot there, and I wanted to see if any sprouts had emerged.  These flowers, which many mistake for dandelions, bloom early, long before the plant sprouts leaves.  Or any other flowers are up (except skunk cabbage).

The only thing that had sprouted up in the park was another war monument.  Let's see, how many war monuments does that make now, just in Congress Park?  American Revolution, Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, plus a flower bed to honor Medal of Honor winners.  And now this new one, erected not to honor a particular war, but all American warriors, in all branches of the military.  There's also a walkway paved with bricks that carry the names of soldiers. Then there's a flagpole and flower planter a block away to honor those who "defended our liberties" in that turkey shoot called Operation Desert Storm.  I mean no disrespect.  I truly honor those who would lay down their lives in defense of our country.  It's just that I can't remember a war (and I'm almost 67 years old) that had anything to do with defending my liberties.  It's been my experience that each time Americans start waving their flags, other people start burying their dead.  And the more inane, illegal, or immoral the conflict, the bigger the flags.  And the more the monuments.

Where are the monuments to those who are healers?  When do we hold parades for those who make peace?  How do we recognize the bravery of those who refuse to take up arms, despite the contempt of their fellows?  At least there's one monument in Congress Park that's not about war.  It's "The Spirit of Life" by Daniel Chester French (the same sculptor who created the Lincoln Memorial), dedicated to the memory of Spencer Trask (1844-1909).  Trask was a philanthropist who supported scientific invention, education, the arts, and humanitarian causes.  His mansion at the edge of Saratoga Springs is now a famous artists' retreat called Yaddo.  And his monument in Congress Park is the most beautiful one of all.

Postscript:  My son said, "Mom, what's this post got to do with nature?" I guess I could write a page or two about what war does to the forests, the land, the wildlife, the rivers. The farms, the gardens, the livestock, the house pets -- I could go on and on.  But I won't.  Instead,  I'll just point to that lovely winged figure in the photo: she's holding a sprig of white pine in one hand, a bowl overflowing with water in the other.  There you have it: woods and waterways.

SIXTY DEGREES!!!

SIXTY DEGREES!!! No wind and nothing but sun.  Man, it felt like Florida here today!  Shirtsleeves and sunglasses:  that's all the gear we needed to go outdoors.  Plus waterproof boots.  The snow's still plenty deep in the woods, but we could walk on top of it without snowshoes.  Most of the time.

Here's a photo of my son Philip, standing on the banks of the Hudson River at Moreau.  We hiked along the river and through the woods, enjoying the water music of trickling streams.  We poked at ice floes, basked in the sun, were dazzled by dancing light off the open water.  We found a patch of wintergreen, bright red berries so plump and tasty it's hard to believe they spent the winter beneath two feet of snow.

And here's another creature out for a stroll on this lovely day:  a coal-black spider walking across the snow.  I wonder what she will find to eat.  Do spiders stock a larder to last all winter?  Do spiders sleep all winter?  Was this one hatched last September, when the autumn air was streaked with hundreds of shining strands of silk, a wee little baby spider attached to each?  So many things I don't know.  I asked for a spider book for my birthday, but that won't be until May.  Maybe someone reading this blog knows the answers.  Hmmm?

A Good Word About Wood-Ears

Oops!  I forgot to include this photo with my post about today's walk.  This cluster of rubbery brown shiny things is the Tree-Ear fungus, also called Wood-Ear (Auriculariaceae auricula).  It's kind of obvious, isn't it, how it got its name.  Although they've been frozen all winter, these  Tree-Ears were as soft and jelly-like today as they were when they first emerged last fall.  I could have brought them home and cooked them up for supper.

My Audubon mushroom guide informs me that lovers of Chinese food have probably eaten their cousin, the closely related Mo-Ehr (A. polytricha), which is widely cultivated and sold at Chinese markets.  Some studies have shown that this fungus can affect blood coagulation and is possibly a factor in the low incidence of coronary artery disease in China.

Darn!  I knew I should have cooked them for supper.

Winter's Greens

Official Spring is less than a week away, but the temperature still flirts with zero at night.  The days, however, are warming up nicely.  Well over 40 today.  This alternate melting and freezing has hardened the snowpack so I could walk through the woods without snowshoes today.  But I don't kid myself that the snow will be gone very soon.  The few times I postholed through, I still went in up to mid-shin.  At least the roadsides and some open fields are bare.  I expect to see bright yellow coltsfoot any day now.

The ice in mid-river has opened up, then closed again with thin, transparent sheets, but the coves and bays and marshes are still white with a foot or more of solid stuff, criss-crossed with cracks and open holes where it looks like the otters went in.  Or out.  I found their tobogganing trails in the woods today.  Out on an ice-covered bay, the dead deer that fed the raptors for weeks has been reduced to a rack of ribs.

On south-facing banks I find surviving evergreen plants, appearing remarkably uncrushed by the heavy snows this winter.  Of course, that snow served as protection against drying wind and cold.  Even though I know their green is left over from fall,  I love the illusion of new life they bring to the woods as we wait and wait and wait and wait for spring.

Wintergreen

Trailing arbutus

Polypody

Some of the dead flower heads are pretty, too.  Here's meadowsweet, growing beside a kettle hole in the rocks my kids and I call Bear's Bathtub.   Speaking of bears, when will they start waking up?  My friend Laurie said she has seen their tracks in the past right across the river from where I took this photo.  We once had one run right down our street in Saratoga Springs, then climb a tree in Congress Park, just a block from my home.

I Am Curious About Yellow

I went for a quick walk today just to get out of the house for a bit, and I came to a quick halt when I spotted this shrub.  Whoa!  That's some kind of  yellow!  It certainly stood out from the lilacs and sumac and dogwood shrubs that surround it.  I haven't a clue what it is.  Maybe some kind of willow?  I know weeping willows turn bright yellow about this time of year.  Any dendrologists out there?  If you don't ID this shrub in a comment here, I'll try to ID it myself when its leaves (maybe flowers?) pop out.  For the moment, at least, it's a bright spot of color in this drab late winter landscape.

(Here's another thing I find curious.  This purple underlining of all the text in this post.  I can't seem to get rid of it.  Oh well.  Just another spot of color.)

Window Watching

Some days I just have to stay home to do chores and can't run off to the woods.  But I can look out the window.  Here's what I saw today.

Here's a crow trying to hog all the scrambled egg I threw outside for the squirrels.  A crow.  Big deal.  Sure, I see them all the time: picking at road kill while daring each car to hit them, or cawing their heads off in the black locust trees that surround my yard.   And once I saw a whole river of them, thousands and thousands of crows from horizon to horizon flowing in one direction across the sky, heading home to their nightly roost.  But I hardly ever see them approach my bird feeders.   Actually, I wish they would.  They're so smart and funny and really quite lovely, their ebony feathers gleaming in the sun.  I read recently that all the birds are getting hungry now, what with most of last fall's bounty gobbled up.  This crow was certainly making a pig of himself, snagging as many bits as he could until they started to drop from his beak.  The squirrels would dart at him now and then, trying to scare him off.  As if! 

Sometimes I'm amazed at the bravery of squirrels.  I've seen them scurry right up to a hawk sitting on the branch of a tree, acting as if they were daring the hawk to catch them.  Like this one here in the photo.  

A few minutes earlier, the hawk had snagged a bird and was sitting on the ground devouring it.  I took these photos through screens, so they're not very sharp.  When I went outside to get better shots, the hawk flew up to a branch of this mulberry tree.  With its prey.  I was watching and couldn't believe my eyes when this squirrel just ambled down the trunk and stared the hawk in the eye.  The hawk just stared back for a while.  Then it lifted its wings and soared off to enjoy its meal in peace.

What the heck kind of hawk is this?  Could it be a juvenile Cooper's?  We have adult Cooper's from time to time, but their breasts are barred with horizontal rusty stripes.  My hawk book shows the juveniles with browner vertical bars.  Please leave a comment if you think you know.

Late-winter Ruminations

My blog has gotten a bit Hallmarky lately, waxing ecstatic about Nature's healing beauty and all that.  I think it's time for a visit to Nature's nastier side.  (The world outside today inspires dark thoughts: a cold rain, filthy snowbanks, and defrosting dog turds everywhere.  Even garbed in Goretex and shod in Sorels, I do not want to go out.)

I found this goldenrod ball gall yesterday.  The neat little hole in it indicates the larva inside was probably gobbled down by a downy woodpecker. (No, it's not the gall resident's exit  hole; that would be much tinier.)  Chickadees also rifle these galls, but make a real mess of them when they do.  And squirrels cut them off and carry them away.  I learned this from John Eastman's Book of Field and Roadside, which I turned to again to learn more about this gall. And its parasite. (Be warned!)

The gall is caused by a fruitfly, Eurosta solidaginis,  which lays a single egg on the stem of the goldenrod (almost exclusively tall goldenrod, Solidago altissima) just before the plant's leaves open. When the larva hatches, it eats its way inside the stem.  Nobody seems to know why the plant reacts the way it does, but a swelling ball of solid tissue forms around where the larva is feeding.  Come fall, the larva chews its way outward through this tissue, making an exit tunnel but leaving the door unopened.  It doesn't leave but retreats to the center, where it sleeps through winter, snug in its now-dead gall, pupating only a few weeks  before spring arrives.  Spring comes, the adult emerges inside the gall, crawls up the tunnel it bored last fall, and finds the door still closed.  Now, the adult fly doesn't have the chewing mouthparts its larva had, so how will it get outside?  Undaunted, it clamps itself to the door, pumps bodily fluids into a special part of its head, and this swelled head bursts the gall's external membrane.  The adult fly then pulls itself out.  Cool!

But that's only if all goes well.  And all will go terribly wrong if its parasite Eurytoma obtusiventris comes along.  This tiny wasp finds the fruitfly egg even before the fly hatches and starts forming its gall.  The wasp sticks its ovipositor into the fly egg and lays an even tinier wasp egg there.  The wasp larva bores into the fly larva and lurks there unnoticed until the latter is full grown.  It then proceeds to devour its host from the inside out.  Eewww! (Don't say I didn't warn you.)

Actually, I think it's pretty neat how all god's chillun get fed.  In nature, that is.  I don't think our factory farms that knowingly torture livestock are fine at all.

Goldenrod ball galls in sunnier days

Off the Couch, Out the Door

Nature brings healing, even to patients' sunset days.

A few posts back, I wrote about the healing power of nature in my own life.  During my years as a nursing assistant for Hospice, I witnessed this power in the lives of others, as well.  Let me tell you about two of these folks.  While it's true they both eventually died, I know that their final days were enriched by getting them off the couch and out the door.

Dan, a Polish-American retired paper mill worker, wanted nothing to do with me.  No, he didn't need a shave.  No, he could shower without my help.  No, he didn't want to chit-chat.  "Just siddown and be quiet.  I wanna watch 'The Price is Right'."  Now, to spend an hour doing nothing was bad enough.  But to have to spend it watching "The Price is Right" -- torture!  So I busied myself making his bed and nosing about for something to read.  And there on his bookshelf were several field guides for mushrooms.  I interrupted his program: "Dan, do you like to hunt mushrooms?  You know, we could go look for some."  It was late autumn.  There might be a few late fruiters.  Click!  The TV turned off.  "Could you really take me?"

Indeed I could.  We drove to a site where he knew some oyster mushrooms might be found. While he sat in the car, he sent me off into the woods.  It must have been angels (plus Dan's good directions) that led me right to them.  A whole bunch.  I gathered a gallon or so, and you know, it might have been gold I laid in his lap, he was so delighted.  And after that adventure, off we would go nearly every day until the day he died.  He'd sit in the car with his oxygen tank (he had terminal heart failure), and we'd drive along the Hudson and Hoosick Rivers, visiting all the haunts of his youth. We found where he used to hide his canoe.  We found where wild asparagus grew.  He recalled how his father was gassed in the war.  He remembered his mother's struggles to run their tavern.  He confessed how he started drinking young, and how mean he had been to his wife when he was drunk.  And he found at last the courage to ask for his wife's forgiveness before he died.  And he died in her loving arms.

* * *

Then there was Eleanor.  I'm not sure what Eleanor's illness was.  Terminal crankiness, probably.  She lived in an assisted living facility, very nice, lots of social events, classes, good meals.  She never left her room.  She wanted her meals sent up.  She wanted her shades pulled down.  The one pleasure she allowed herself was to sit on the porch  in her wheelchair on pleasant days.  One day I rolled her down the ramp: "Some blue-eyed grass is blooming near the parking lot," I told her.  She reluctantly consented.  She had never seen (nor ever cared to see) blue-eyed grass, but that day her eyes were opened.  A sea of radiant blue covered a vacant lot, studded with bright yellow sundrops and snowy wild strawberry.  "Oh my! How pretty," she said (in spite of herself). 

The blue-eyed grass that opened Eleanor's eyes

All summer we walked and rolled, on into the fall.  If the day was rainy, she waited for me in her raincoat.  She couldn't get over the beauty of blue vervain ("How can that be a weed?") or the tiny pink blossoms of northern willow herb ("Wouldn't they make a darling dollhouse bouquet?") We picked gorgeous bundles of panicled dogwood (burgundy leaves, waxy white berries on hot pink pedicels) mixed with the dark maroon seed sprays of curly dock.  Then we got in trouble for bringing in armloads of goldenrod.  Her daughter threw it all out: "Get those weeds out of here!  They're dropping pollen all over!"  I heard that cranky tone and marvelled: that's how Eleanor used to sound.  She didn't anymore. 

Blackbird Singin' in the Dead of Winter

It will be a long time yet before cattail clumps are sheltering baby red-wing blackbirds.  But I learned today that I wasn't deluded to go looking for daddy red-wings this early in March.  Bob Henke, outdoors columnist for the Glens Falls Post Star, reported in his column today that he saw his first red-wing on February 27, "singing to proclaim his territorial boundaries in a nasty snow flurry."  And that robin I saw yesterday?  According to Henke, robins (and bluebirds, too) were here a couple of weeks before the blackbird.  And all of them are males, "decked out in their finest battle dress."  The females are still down south, keeping warm and fattening up for the nesting rigors to come.  They won't arrive for maybe a month or more.

But what do these male birds find to eat up here while the ground is frozen, no buds are sprouting, no insects crawling or flying about, and all the dried fruits and seeds leftover from fall have pretty much been eaten up by winter residents? Well, they often don't eat anything. The only thing on their minds is finding good nesting sites to lure their mates when the females at last arrive, and in avian real estate battles, it's usually first come, first claimed.  As Henke explains, "Although male birds sometimes fight quite viciously over territories, studies show that in more than 95 percent of the conflicts, the male who was resident in the territory wins out over an interloper."  So the goal is to get here first, even if it means going unfed for a month or so.  And apparently we can't help them much by hanging extra feeders. As Henke writes, "no male will leave his turf unguarded to go looking for a snack."

Henke closes his column with this sobering statistic:  "Couple this stress with the demands of feeding a hungry brood or two over the summer and you will understand why less than 10 percent of passerine [migratory] males survive to make a second migration."  

So the early bird doesn't get the worm.  Let's hope he at least gets the girl.

Twigs and Tracks and a Big Wet Kiss

Well, it sure seemed like spring today:  over 50 degrees, and I saw a robin.  The truth is, I've seen robins off and on all winter, big flocks of them, feeding in crabapple trees and sumac.  But this was a solitary robin, running across a patch of bare grass.  Winter dead grass.  But still . . .grass!  Anyway, the true harbinger of spring for me is the red-winged blackbird, not robins.  Growing up as I did on a lake with a marsh in my backyard, that conk-a-reeee-ah bugling through cattails sounds to my ears like a reveille waking spring.  So off to a marsh I went, in hopes of hearing that call.

Nope.  I didn't hear any red-winged blackbirds.  Nor see them.  But I had a nice walk on Bog Meadow Trail, a flat track that runs for about two miles on an old railroad bed, passing through forested wetlands and a couple of open marshes (no bogs: the name's a misnomer).  I did flush a couple of mallards, but they hang around here all winter anyway, so that's nothing new. Aside from the trailside streams in full flow, the whole area still seemed all buttoned up for winter.  The red osier shrubs were certainly rosy, but I think they stay that color all year.  It's just that when all the leaves are gone we can see them better. Pretty.

Red osier dogwood twigs

There weren't many animal tracks anywhere, aside from a few deer trails.  And then I saw this BIG one.  Four toes, claws showing.  A canid.  "Holy mackerel!"  I thought, "that's one big coyote!"  I was kneeling down to take a photo when the monster ran right up to me and licked my face. How could I forget that this is a popular dog run?  Her name is Tess and she's a Bernese Mountain Dog,  just like my granddog Sampson.  Good girl!  What a good girl!  God, those dogs are great!

Big track

Big dog

 As I said before, I had a good walk.  But then, walks usually are.  And I often learn something, too.  Like not jumping to conclusions about coyotes.