Nature Post!
Well, mostly a lot of mud. But mud is nature, right?
I started doubling the dose of my new medication last night, and to my surprise, I felt less sleepy today than I did on the lower dose. Medications are weird. Anyway, I managed to read the last of the stuff for tomorrow morning's live epidemiology class (and I hope he's going to explain some of those formulas because one of them had that sigma thing from calculus in it and I don't remember how to do that, but most of them are reasonably straightforward, and at least they apply to something relevant, such as how many people in a given population are infected with a certain disease over a given period of time and how the numbers are different for different populations).
ANYWAY...
I was pleased with finishing that so I went for a walk... just out in our woods here, since I wasn't feeling optimistic enough to drive to the lake today. I will if the weather continues to cooperate. I borrowed Honey's sweatshirt (I gave mine to the porch cat this winter to cover his box) and I got mud on it. Spring here mostly consists of mud.
I have no idea what these are yet but they're the first thing I've seen growing so far this spring!
Finding this gem was nothing but luck and a habit of poking around in random places... I had tromped off into the woods to look for things and saw a little patch of leaves that looked odd (out of ALL THE LEAVES) and poked it and there was this beautiful thing. From the way the surface layer is peeling, I suspect it's been without a resident for a while, but it's thin enough to be transparent when you hold it up to light, so it can't have been sitting around for terribly long without getting crushed. Snail shells are not a common find here and neither are snails, which I suspect has to do with the very healthy and very hungry populations of three predators... raccoons, opposums, and shrews. Most birds aren't fond of snails, although some of them are, but raccoons and opposums are omivores that will eat anything they can find, and they are both large enough to crush snail shells (raccoons are cute; opposums are NOT). Shrews are such psychotically voracious little insectivores that they eat up to twice their body weight every day (they have an absurdly high metabolism). They look like mice but are not rodents and are closely related to moles, which are also insectivores, and like moles they have terrible vision but incredible senses of smell and touch. There is basically nothing they will not eat.
(As a random note, the group to which shrews belong long predates the rodents, and in fact predates the dinosaurs by about 60 million years, while rodents didn't evolve as a group until space was cleared for them by the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs, which is the correct way to discuss their extinction since the avian dinosaurs continue to thrive as our feathered friends)
Speaking of things that predate the dinosaurs, horsetails had already mastered the art of giving no fucks about 500 million years ago (dinosaurs didn't wander onto the scene until almost 250 million years later, and the only things that might have bothered the vast forests of horsetails and other primitive plants in their glory days would have been primitive arthropods). Horsetails continue to give no fucks today, although they are vastly diminished from their days as the dominant plants that grew to tree height. Snow, cold, and other unpleasant conditions seem to be completely ignored. They will just sit under two or three feet of snow, giving no fucks, until it melts and they can go back to doing what they do, which is making more horsetails.
I feared for the kissing trees last year when it became clear that the one on the right was mostly dead. Winter was not kind to them and the sickly one is now completely deceased, having lost all of its bark from the upper part of the trunk (a tree without its bark is something like a human without its skin, if you also relied on your skin to transfer water and nutrients from your feet to your head and back). The other tree does not seem perturbed that it is now romantically entwined with a skinless corpse. Perhaps trees do not find this sort of thing as concerning as humans might.
I made my way down to where the beaver dam used to be. Years without beavers have rendered it nearly unrecognizable... the only remains of the dam are the ridges on either side of the creek where the fallen tree has become stuck. The remains of the very large pond the beavers created for their use is behind the fallen dam and consists of a very flat and very empty field studded with rotted stumps of trees and undercut by dozens of tiny streams flowing through the soft sediment that accumulated at the bottom of the pond. All the space you can see where there are no trees was once a pond. It's not clear why the beavers moved on... there are still many trees suitable for their use, although this particular part of the forest, unlike our usual maple-oak-cherry-poplar mix, is almost all beech trees. This makes sense since beech trees can take over an area by sending up new saplings from their root systems, basically creating a forest of interconnected clones. Also, this area is wetter than most places, and the beeches may tolerate that better... our maples and oaks seem to generally disapprove of having wet feet.
Beavers eat bark and twigs, which are the only parts of the wood with much nutrition. There are many trees like this that they didn't get as far as cutting down, but they did eat most of the bark off the base of it. I'm not sure how this tree survived this, but is has regrown some patches of very scarred-looking bark over the damaged areas.
The line around this tree looks a little too cleanly-cut for beavers to be responsible, and it may have been girdled, as it is a very large tree and they may have intended to cut it down, or just to kill it and let more young beeches grow. It could also have been beavers, as that gnaw mark on the bottom left looks very beaver-ish. Despite the damage and the fact that the other side of the tree is completely dead and rotting, this half has managed to regrow bark over the gap (you can see how scarred and knotty the bridging bark is) and survive the attack, although eventually the fungus eating away at the heartwood will weaken the tree and it will break. Trees do not care if they have been mortally wounded, since a mortal wound may take decades to actually finish them off and there are many seeds to be produced in that time.
I wanted to see if I could find the tree stand that "the boys" built last year for hunting (the floor rotted out of the old one). I'm a bit annoyed that it has nicer siding on it than our trailer, but I suppose it's a bit smaller, too.
I saved the best for last because I TOLD YOU I WOULD GET PICTURES OF THESE FOR YOU AND I FINALLY DID! It required getting very, very muddy, but they do like to live in inconveniently wet places... see the weird purplish-red round-ish structures? They are skunk cabbage flowers!
This is one of a very small number of plants where the flower comes up before the leaves. This is tricky because it means the plant must produce the flower relying solely on its supplies from the year before, but it means that the flowers get a head start over anything else in the area. They are also exothermic... they generate so much heat that they can melt through snow. This is partly to help them get their early start, and partly to increase their attractiveness to their primary pollinator.
These oddities are pollinated by flies, which as everyone knows can manage to appear out of the middle of nowhere during any season for no reason whatsoever. They like these flowers because they make warmness and because they smell bad... hence the name "skunk cabbage".
I was very pleased to find these, as they don't last tremendously long and within a few days they will be mostly replaced by the green leafy part of the plant, which you can see just sprouting out of the base of this one.
Anyway, that will be all.
.
.
.
I started doubling the dose of my new medication last night, and to my surprise, I felt less sleepy today than I did on the lower dose. Medications are weird. Anyway, I managed to read the last of the stuff for tomorrow morning's live epidemiology class (and I hope he's going to explain some of those formulas because one of them had that sigma thing from calculus in it and I don't remember how to do that, but most of them are reasonably straightforward, and at least they apply to something relevant, such as how many people in a given population are infected with a certain disease over a given period of time and how the numbers are different for different populations).
ANYWAY...
I was pleased with finishing that so I went for a walk... just out in our woods here, since I wasn't feeling optimistic enough to drive to the lake today. I will if the weather continues to cooperate. I borrowed Honey's sweatshirt (I gave mine to the porch cat this winter to cover his box) and I got mud on it. Spring here mostly consists of mud.
I have no idea what these are yet but they're the first thing I've seen growing so far this spring!
Finding this gem was nothing but luck and a habit of poking around in random places... I had tromped off into the woods to look for things and saw a little patch of leaves that looked odd (out of ALL THE LEAVES) and poked it and there was this beautiful thing. From the way the surface layer is peeling, I suspect it's been without a resident for a while, but it's thin enough to be transparent when you hold it up to light, so it can't have been sitting around for terribly long without getting crushed. Snail shells are not a common find here and neither are snails, which I suspect has to do with the very healthy and very hungry populations of three predators... raccoons, opposums, and shrews. Most birds aren't fond of snails, although some of them are, but raccoons and opposums are omivores that will eat anything they can find, and they are both large enough to crush snail shells (raccoons are cute; opposums are NOT). Shrews are such psychotically voracious little insectivores that they eat up to twice their body weight every day (they have an absurdly high metabolism). They look like mice but are not rodents and are closely related to moles, which are also insectivores, and like moles they have terrible vision but incredible senses of smell and touch. There is basically nothing they will not eat.
(As a random note, the group to which shrews belong long predates the rodents, and in fact predates the dinosaurs by about 60 million years, while rodents didn't evolve as a group until space was cleared for them by the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs, which is the correct way to discuss their extinction since the avian dinosaurs continue to thrive as our feathered friends)
Speaking of things that predate the dinosaurs, horsetails had already mastered the art of giving no fucks about 500 million years ago (dinosaurs didn't wander onto the scene until almost 250 million years later, and the only things that might have bothered the vast forests of horsetails and other primitive plants in their glory days would have been primitive arthropods). Horsetails continue to give no fucks today, although they are vastly diminished from their days as the dominant plants that grew to tree height. Snow, cold, and other unpleasant conditions seem to be completely ignored. They will just sit under two or three feet of snow, giving no fucks, until it melts and they can go back to doing what they do, which is making more horsetails.
I feared for the kissing trees last year when it became clear that the one on the right was mostly dead. Winter was not kind to them and the sickly one is now completely deceased, having lost all of its bark from the upper part of the trunk (a tree without its bark is something like a human without its skin, if you also relied on your skin to transfer water and nutrients from your feet to your head and back). The other tree does not seem perturbed that it is now romantically entwined with a skinless corpse. Perhaps trees do not find this sort of thing as concerning as humans might.
I made my way down to where the beaver dam used to be. Years without beavers have rendered it nearly unrecognizable... the only remains of the dam are the ridges on either side of the creek where the fallen tree has become stuck. The remains of the very large pond the beavers created for their use is behind the fallen dam and consists of a very flat and very empty field studded with rotted stumps of trees and undercut by dozens of tiny streams flowing through the soft sediment that accumulated at the bottom of the pond. All the space you can see where there are no trees was once a pond. It's not clear why the beavers moved on... there are still many trees suitable for their use, although this particular part of the forest, unlike our usual maple-oak-cherry-poplar mix, is almost all beech trees. This makes sense since beech trees can take over an area by sending up new saplings from their root systems, basically creating a forest of interconnected clones. Also, this area is wetter than most places, and the beeches may tolerate that better... our maples and oaks seem to generally disapprove of having wet feet.
Beavers eat bark and twigs, which are the only parts of the wood with much nutrition. There are many trees like this that they didn't get as far as cutting down, but they did eat most of the bark off the base of it. I'm not sure how this tree survived this, but is has regrown some patches of very scarred-looking bark over the damaged areas.
The line around this tree looks a little too cleanly-cut for beavers to be responsible, and it may have been girdled, as it is a very large tree and they may have intended to cut it down, or just to kill it and let more young beeches grow. It could also have been beavers, as that gnaw mark on the bottom left looks very beaver-ish. Despite the damage and the fact that the other side of the tree is completely dead and rotting, this half has managed to regrow bark over the gap (you can see how scarred and knotty the bridging bark is) and survive the attack, although eventually the fungus eating away at the heartwood will weaken the tree and it will break. Trees do not care if they have been mortally wounded, since a mortal wound may take decades to actually finish them off and there are many seeds to be produced in that time.
I wanted to see if I could find the tree stand that "the boys" built last year for hunting (the floor rotted out of the old one). I'm a bit annoyed that it has nicer siding on it than our trailer, but I suppose it's a bit smaller, too.
I saved the best for last because I TOLD YOU I WOULD GET PICTURES OF THESE FOR YOU AND I FINALLY DID! It required getting very, very muddy, but they do like to live in inconveniently wet places... see the weird purplish-red round-ish structures? They are skunk cabbage flowers!
This is one of a very small number of plants where the flower comes up before the leaves. This is tricky because it means the plant must produce the flower relying solely on its supplies from the year before, but it means that the flowers get a head start over anything else in the area. They are also exothermic... they generate so much heat that they can melt through snow. This is partly to help them get their early start, and partly to increase their attractiveness to their primary pollinator.
These oddities are pollinated by flies, which as everyone knows can manage to appear out of the middle of nowhere during any season for no reason whatsoever. They like these flowers because they make warmness and because they smell bad... hence the name "skunk cabbage".
I was very pleased to find these, as they don't last tremendously long and within a few days they will be mostly replaced by the green leafy part of the plant, which you can see just sprouting out of the base of this one.
Anyway, that will be all.
.
.
.