More nature... why not?
I've been trying to get outside whenever I get a chance, although it seems like work exhausts me and then I sleep and then I wake up and have just enough time to do school stuff before I have to go back to work... but it's all going along. Today was the first of three glorious days off... well, I have classes all three days, but not work, and I already took the quiz and exam for this week, so I'm mostly caught up. I might even get some time to relax and play some Sims 4 if I ever feel like I can get enthusiastic about anything other than naptime...
Anyway... I went down to the lake and spent some time wandering around. I didn't go very far because my knees and heels were really sore from a couple of long shifts (they're starting to feel better now, though). I did wander down a little trail that some fishermen have created to get access to little secluded spots along the shoreline for fishing, and from the tracks it appears deer use it too... and I found one of my favorite plants growing in abundance, even though I've only found it one other place on the other side of the lake! Anyway...
A picture of my lake's mood for the day... mostly clear sky, slightly breezy, with some ripples to distort the reflections of the clouds. The water level is still low, but the farther you are from the dam the less you notice it. It is quite obvious at the end opposite the dam, which is mostly very shallow swampland... yesterday there were several fishermen in wading boots standing on a strip of mud that's usually a foot or two underwater, and the algae is getting very thick.
Found the path half-hidden behind a big clump of "I'm tired of trying to identify yellow flowers because there are 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,032 of them so I quit" flowers. Your guess is as good as mine.
Just a nice view... I like seeing the water framed by leaves. I suppose it's the most natural frame possible for such a picture.
Found this big tree, apparently somewhat recently fallen, since the leaves are dead but not rotted away, which means it fell at least during this growing season... the leaves would have disintegrated during the winter under all the snow. What's odd at first is that although this is a large tree, it appears to have pulled up very little soil or very much of a root network when it fell. I would have expected a fairly massive chunk of entangled dirt and roots to be dragged out of the ground when a tree this size went over. Look carefully at the base of the tree, though... see how part of the bark is blackened and some of the wood is darkened, and some of it looks almost furry? This tree was taken down by a butt rot fungus. Despite the undignified name, it's descriptively accurate. These are fungi that attack the tree at the soil line, around the base of the trunk, and usually produce fruiting bodies either against or close to the trunk of the tree. They are responsible for many of the trees you find that have large rotten cavities at the base. This tree didn't survive the attack... the fungus must have so thoroughly rotted out the base of the tree that it tore loose from its roots instead of pulling them up. Trees attacked by many kinds of fungi will look unhealthy and have lumps, discolorations, or fruiting bodies on the trunk, but the butt rot fungi can be very insidious and tree specialists know that trees under this form of attack are dangerous because they look healthy but can fall, like this one did, with very little provocation.
Since the Hymenoptera have been on display lately (thinking of Ms. Hornet striking a pose for me last week), here's a very contented honeybee working industriously on a boneset flower. As a random side note, Hymenoptera is the third largest order of insects, made up of ants, bees, wasps and wasp-like things, and sawflies (whatever those are). Second place, if you care, belongs to the Lepidoptera, the butterflies and moths. First place by a mile belongs to Coleoptera, the beetles (the name means "sheathed wing" because the upper pair of wings has evolved into a stury shield protecting the delicate flying wings, making beetles so adaptable to almost any environment). This order of insects earns its first place spot by containing a massive 40% of all known insect species by itself. The famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane was apparently once asked what characteristics God might display, based on His creations, and Haldane's response was "an inordinate fondness for beetles". Either divine favor or evolution likes beetles an awful lot, though because there are an awful lot of them.
Morning glories come in many colors, but around here they seem to often be this pink and white variety. I don't know if it's a natural one or not... morning glories are a popular garden plant even though they're also a massive garden pest (humans are not smart about what we think would be good to plant in gardens). They belong to the family Convolvulaceae, The seeds contain, in very minute amounts, a chemical relative of the 60's-favorite-hallucinogen LSD, but as found in the plant it is closer to the toxin produced by ergot, which tends to cause more of the my-neighbor's-arm-fell-off-and-all-the-cows-died-and-our-daughters-have-gone-batshit-so-we're-gonna-burn-the-old-lady-down-the-road type of trip than the swirling-colors-and-harmony-with-the-universe stuff that apparently made LSD popular. Incidentally, the neighbor's arm falling off, the cows dying, and the girls having hallucinations were not unrelated... ergot is a fungus that infects cereal grains and contains a number of different related toxins, one of which constricts bloodflow, another of which induces labor and can cause abortions or deaths in pregnant animals, and yet another of which can cause unpleasant hallucinations such as being attacked by insects. All in all, good reasons why people do not cultivate rotten cereal to get high. Many of the witch trials have been blamed on ergot contamination of grain supplies. Morning glories are not related to ergot, which is a parasitic fungus, but the chemical in their seeds that people say "is like LSD" is actually more like the hallucinogenic factor in ergot, which does not sound like any kind of fun at all.
Oh, and the seeds are also well-known as purgatives, which means before you even absorb enough toxin to hallucinate, you'll either vomit them up or copiously excrete them along with everything else in your colon.
A few samples of pine cones from the same tree... the green one is this year's cone, and most of them are still on the tree. The other two are last year's cones. When they're ripe, the scales separate and the seeds are released...
That's assuming that something doesn't get to the seeds first. Or, in this case, the entire cone. This huge pile at the base of the pine tree is made up entirely of pine cones and their scales, which have been stripped off to leave what look like little corn cobs. The culprits here are almost certainly red squirrels, American red squirrels are a different species than Eurasian red squirrels, and their diet is geared mainly toward doing exactly what these ones have been doing... eating the hell out of pine cones. They are opportunists, though, and are not in any way too picky to take whatever is in your bird feeder or trash can or anywhere else. They are faster, louder, smaller, and more aggressive than gray squirrels and are very territorial and very vocal about it. The burrow in the picture is probably a quick escape... they don't build nests underground but they're not above hiding out there, and almost all rodents can dig. These piles, by the way, are called middens, and squirrels defend this territory fiercely.
Some of the semi-aquatic plants from my last post, except that these are still in the water and are intermixed with sedges and reeds. It's hard to describe how important these bits of habitat are to the ecosystems of both lake and surrounding land... insects, birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, and reptiles all rely on habitat just like this to raise their offspring and find food. Draining watersheds to provide water for cities far away destroys this critical habitat, but no one complains because cities are full of people and smelly wet bogs are not.
This is a tiger swallowtail, one of the biggest and most noticeable butterflies in the eastern part of North America. All males are yellow with black markings. So are most females, but some of them, like this one, are what's known as the "dark morph", identical to the other females in all ways except their coloration. Whatever causes the dimorphism is apparently not genetic, because dark morph females produce offspring with the same ratio of normal and dark morphs as their more ordinary sisters. The purpose of the dimorphic females is unknown, but they may be mimics of the poisonous pipevine swallowtail. These toxic butterflies live in California and Central America, and some research indicates that the dark morph of tiger swallowtails occurs more frequently in the southern part of their range where predators might be more likely to have met the unpleasant-tasting lookalike.
One of my all-time favorite discoveries and favorite plants... I've posted it once before. This is Apios americana, also known as potato bean and American groundnut. It is a legume and produces beans (peas and peanuts are also legumes) and also produces an underground tuber that is NOT a potato (potatoes are NOT legumes). They were widely used by Native Americans, but I just love the stunning flowers with their unique color and their sprawling vines.
Another picture, just because I know of nothing else that looks like this, and it's just wonderful. While this plant's tubers are apparently very tasty and, unlike potatoes and other sources of starchy root vegetables would restore instead of deplete soil nitrogen, attempts to cultivate them as a food crop have never taken off. I'm not sure why, but they don't seem to be fast or aggressive growers. I love them and it made my day to find them. I took more pictures, but they look the same, so I'll just keep them and enjoy them. You get the idea, and maybe if you live in my part of the world you'll be lucky enough to find one! They grow everywhere from Canada to Florida and as far west as the Rocky Mountains.
Odd side note... American groundnuts are cultivated, and wildly popular, in a certain random part of Japan, where they are considered to have important health benefits. It's not clear whether they were introduced accidentally or as a decorative flower, but they're there.
A lone vertebra lying by itself, half-buried in the dirt. An animal probably carried it away from the rest of the body, but I'm not sure what the body might have been... it looks a bit large for a deer, especially the hole the spinal cord would have passed through, but I'll have to check with Honey... maybe big bucks have bones like this and I'm just used to seeing the bones of does, which are more delicately built.
Pontoon boats are not terribly speedy or efficient, but they are wonderfully comfortable and lazy ways to enjoy the lake and the water and the sunshine. Unfortunately one must own all the equipment required to transport and store a pontoon boat, not to mention actually owning a pontoon boat, to enjoy these benefits. You can rent them for the day at some bigger lakes with more campers and tourists. If I had one I'd try to figure out how to live sustainably on my lake all year round and ice fish or something in the winter and built a lodge in the middle of the lake like a beaver and stay there forever.
.
.
.
Anyway... I went down to the lake and spent some time wandering around. I didn't go very far because my knees and heels were really sore from a couple of long shifts (they're starting to feel better now, though). I did wander down a little trail that some fishermen have created to get access to little secluded spots along the shoreline for fishing, and from the tracks it appears deer use it too... and I found one of my favorite plants growing in abundance, even though I've only found it one other place on the other side of the lake! Anyway...
A picture of my lake's mood for the day... mostly clear sky, slightly breezy, with some ripples to distort the reflections of the clouds. The water level is still low, but the farther you are from the dam the less you notice it. It is quite obvious at the end opposite the dam, which is mostly very shallow swampland... yesterday there were several fishermen in wading boots standing on a strip of mud that's usually a foot or two underwater, and the algae is getting very thick.
Found the path half-hidden behind a big clump of "I'm tired of trying to identify yellow flowers because there are 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,032 of them so I quit" flowers. Your guess is as good as mine.
Just a nice view... I like seeing the water framed by leaves. I suppose it's the most natural frame possible for such a picture.
Found this big tree, apparently somewhat recently fallen, since the leaves are dead but not rotted away, which means it fell at least during this growing season... the leaves would have disintegrated during the winter under all the snow. What's odd at first is that although this is a large tree, it appears to have pulled up very little soil or very much of a root network when it fell. I would have expected a fairly massive chunk of entangled dirt and roots to be dragged out of the ground when a tree this size went over. Look carefully at the base of the tree, though... see how part of the bark is blackened and some of the wood is darkened, and some of it looks almost furry? This tree was taken down by a butt rot fungus. Despite the undignified name, it's descriptively accurate. These are fungi that attack the tree at the soil line, around the base of the trunk, and usually produce fruiting bodies either against or close to the trunk of the tree. They are responsible for many of the trees you find that have large rotten cavities at the base. This tree didn't survive the attack... the fungus must have so thoroughly rotted out the base of the tree that it tore loose from its roots instead of pulling them up. Trees attacked by many kinds of fungi will look unhealthy and have lumps, discolorations, or fruiting bodies on the trunk, but the butt rot fungi can be very insidious and tree specialists know that trees under this form of attack are dangerous because they look healthy but can fall, like this one did, with very little provocation.
Since the Hymenoptera have been on display lately (thinking of Ms. Hornet striking a pose for me last week), here's a very contented honeybee working industriously on a boneset flower. As a random side note, Hymenoptera is the third largest order of insects, made up of ants, bees, wasps and wasp-like things, and sawflies (whatever those are). Second place, if you care, belongs to the Lepidoptera, the butterflies and moths. First place by a mile belongs to Coleoptera, the beetles (the name means "sheathed wing" because the upper pair of wings has evolved into a stury shield protecting the delicate flying wings, making beetles so adaptable to almost any environment). This order of insects earns its first place spot by containing a massive 40% of all known insect species by itself. The famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane was apparently once asked what characteristics God might display, based on His creations, and Haldane's response was "an inordinate fondness for beetles". Either divine favor or evolution likes beetles an awful lot, though because there are an awful lot of them.
Morning glories come in many colors, but around here they seem to often be this pink and white variety. I don't know if it's a natural one or not... morning glories are a popular garden plant even though they're also a massive garden pest (humans are not smart about what we think would be good to plant in gardens). They belong to the family Convolvulaceae, The seeds contain, in very minute amounts, a chemical relative of the 60's-favorite-hallucinogen LSD, but as found in the plant it is closer to the toxin produced by ergot, which tends to cause more of the my-neighbor's-arm-fell-off-and-all-the-cows-died-and-our-daughters-have-gone-batshit-so-we're-gonna-burn-the-old-lady-down-the-road type of trip than the swirling-colors-and-harmony-with-the-universe stuff that apparently made LSD popular. Incidentally, the neighbor's arm falling off, the cows dying, and the girls having hallucinations were not unrelated... ergot is a fungus that infects cereal grains and contains a number of different related toxins, one of which constricts bloodflow, another of which induces labor and can cause abortions or deaths in pregnant animals, and yet another of which can cause unpleasant hallucinations such as being attacked by insects. All in all, good reasons why people do not cultivate rotten cereal to get high. Many of the witch trials have been blamed on ergot contamination of grain supplies. Morning glories are not related to ergot, which is a parasitic fungus, but the chemical in their seeds that people say "is like LSD" is actually more like the hallucinogenic factor in ergot, which does not sound like any kind of fun at all.
Oh, and the seeds are also well-known as purgatives, which means before you even absorb enough toxin to hallucinate, you'll either vomit them up or copiously excrete them along with everything else in your colon.
A few samples of pine cones from the same tree... the green one is this year's cone, and most of them are still on the tree. The other two are last year's cones. When they're ripe, the scales separate and the seeds are released...
That's assuming that something doesn't get to the seeds first. Or, in this case, the entire cone. This huge pile at the base of the pine tree is made up entirely of pine cones and their scales, which have been stripped off to leave what look like little corn cobs. The culprits here are almost certainly red squirrels, American red squirrels are a different species than Eurasian red squirrels, and their diet is geared mainly toward doing exactly what these ones have been doing... eating the hell out of pine cones. They are opportunists, though, and are not in any way too picky to take whatever is in your bird feeder or trash can or anywhere else. They are faster, louder, smaller, and more aggressive than gray squirrels and are very territorial and very vocal about it. The burrow in the picture is probably a quick escape... they don't build nests underground but they're not above hiding out there, and almost all rodents can dig. These piles, by the way, are called middens, and squirrels defend this territory fiercely.
Some of the semi-aquatic plants from my last post, except that these are still in the water and are intermixed with sedges and reeds. It's hard to describe how important these bits of habitat are to the ecosystems of both lake and surrounding land... insects, birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, and reptiles all rely on habitat just like this to raise their offspring and find food. Draining watersheds to provide water for cities far away destroys this critical habitat, but no one complains because cities are full of people and smelly wet bogs are not.
This is a tiger swallowtail, one of the biggest and most noticeable butterflies in the eastern part of North America. All males are yellow with black markings. So are most females, but some of them, like this one, are what's known as the "dark morph", identical to the other females in all ways except their coloration. Whatever causes the dimorphism is apparently not genetic, because dark morph females produce offspring with the same ratio of normal and dark morphs as their more ordinary sisters. The purpose of the dimorphic females is unknown, but they may be mimics of the poisonous pipevine swallowtail. These toxic butterflies live in California and Central America, and some research indicates that the dark morph of tiger swallowtails occurs more frequently in the southern part of their range where predators might be more likely to have met the unpleasant-tasting lookalike.
One of my all-time favorite discoveries and favorite plants... I've posted it once before. This is Apios americana, also known as potato bean and American groundnut. It is a legume and produces beans (peas and peanuts are also legumes) and also produces an underground tuber that is NOT a potato (potatoes are NOT legumes). They were widely used by Native Americans, but I just love the stunning flowers with their unique color and their sprawling vines.
Another picture, just because I know of nothing else that looks like this, and it's just wonderful. While this plant's tubers are apparently very tasty and, unlike potatoes and other sources of starchy root vegetables would restore instead of deplete soil nitrogen, attempts to cultivate them as a food crop have never taken off. I'm not sure why, but they don't seem to be fast or aggressive growers. I love them and it made my day to find them. I took more pictures, but they look the same, so I'll just keep them and enjoy them. You get the idea, and maybe if you live in my part of the world you'll be lucky enough to find one! They grow everywhere from Canada to Florida and as far west as the Rocky Mountains.
Odd side note... American groundnuts are cultivated, and wildly popular, in a certain random part of Japan, where they are considered to have important health benefits. It's not clear whether they were introduced accidentally or as a decorative flower, but they're there.
A lone vertebra lying by itself, half-buried in the dirt. An animal probably carried it away from the rest of the body, but I'm not sure what the body might have been... it looks a bit large for a deer, especially the hole the spinal cord would have passed through, but I'll have to check with Honey... maybe big bucks have bones like this and I'm just used to seeing the bones of does, which are more delicately built.
Pontoon boats are not terribly speedy or efficient, but they are wonderfully comfortable and lazy ways to enjoy the lake and the water and the sunshine. Unfortunately one must own all the equipment required to transport and store a pontoon boat, not to mention actually owning a pontoon boat, to enjoy these benefits. You can rent them for the day at some bigger lakes with more campers and tourists. If I had one I'd try to figure out how to live sustainably on my lake all year round and ice fish or something in the winter and built a lodge in the middle of the lake like a beaver and stay there forever.
.
.
.