Spring Nature Post!
Not much happening this early in the year, but I still need to get out, if I can... not to see what's already there, but to look at where things WILL be... to watch eagerly for those familiar things to start appearing. I know where they will be now, like trains that always arrive at the same station at a certain time. I wait for the trout lilies and trilliums of early spring, then for the may apples with their umbrella heads and the flowering fruit trees and the wild phlox, then for the pink-white milkweed blossoms, the seven-foot stands of purple Joe Pye weed, the profusion of orange day lilies and the red flourish of bee balm. All of these things, and then at the end the deep purple ironweed and the plumes of goldenrods and the changing leaves. But for now, I wait.
My lake waits, its shores a dull brown but filled with migrating birds returning home.
There are always the skunk cabbages, those winter-spring oddities that produce their own heat and come up through the snow, that flower before they have leaves and produce such a weird purple lump of a blosson that it's barely recognizable as a flower at all.
Only a biologist would probably call this smelly thing a flower, but that's what it is... pollinated by those flies that like smelly things and have a knack for appearing on any warm day, even in the dead of winter.
The mature flower welcomes flies in, but protects the important parts from inclement weather. It's a clever design, if not an attractive one, and skunk cabbage is the dominant plant in our wet-but-not-submerged-and-somewhat-shady areas from the first breath of spring till late summer. The drier and somewhat shady areas will belong to the May apples.
An assortment of our early spring ephemerals, although identifying the tiny things is more than I have energy for today.
It's always nice to find the little patches of whatever this is, possiby striped wintergreen... I'll know for sure when the flowers make their appearance.
Another evergreen, the innocuous little ground vine known as squaw berry. The low-growing plant lurks among the mosses and holds its little berries all winter.
The forest floor, especially on hillsides and rough patches, is dominated by horsetails, the marvelous give-no-fucks survivors that watched the first tetrapods crawling around in swamps and laughed off the extinction event that took out the dinosaurs. A little snow (or a lot of snow) is not enough to phase them.
There has always been good evidence that there USED to be beavers in and around the lake, but every year I find more evidence of where they're living right now...
This is quite fresh. This is what beavers do... eat the bark and then get down to the business of trying to gnaw down the tree, except that these beavers aren't building a dam, so they don't seem to bother to chew them all the way down.
This sapling victim is very fresh, and the gnawing away at the wood around a certain spot is what distinguishes beaver chomping from porcupine chomping. This sapling has been thoroughly girled and will probably fall within a year.
This one they didn't make much of an effort to chop down, but they did chew it up quite a bit and eat a good patch of bark. Trees are quite able to survive this, at least in the short term.
This poor fellow survived a previous beaver mauling and spent many years regrowing bark around the dead, gnawed trunk... and now the beavers have been back to chew on that!
I know not what kind of tree makes these pretty catkins but I will try to find out.
And if you can tell which of the branches on this tree actually belong to the tree and which belong to the grapevine that has twined in from the left, you have better eyes than me...
And that is all and I need a nap before dinner with people.
.
.
.
My lake waits, its shores a dull brown but filled with migrating birds returning home.
There are always the skunk cabbages, those winter-spring oddities that produce their own heat and come up through the snow, that flower before they have leaves and produce such a weird purple lump of a blosson that it's barely recognizable as a flower at all.
Only a biologist would probably call this smelly thing a flower, but that's what it is... pollinated by those flies that like smelly things and have a knack for appearing on any warm day, even in the dead of winter.
The mature flower welcomes flies in, but protects the important parts from inclement weather. It's a clever design, if not an attractive one, and skunk cabbage is the dominant plant in our wet-but-not-submerged-and-somewhat-shady areas from the first breath of spring till late summer. The drier and somewhat shady areas will belong to the May apples.
An assortment of our early spring ephemerals, although identifying the tiny things is more than I have energy for today.
It's always nice to find the little patches of whatever this is, possiby striped wintergreen... I'll know for sure when the flowers make their appearance.
Another evergreen, the innocuous little ground vine known as squaw berry. The low-growing plant lurks among the mosses and holds its little berries all winter.
The forest floor, especially on hillsides and rough patches, is dominated by horsetails, the marvelous give-no-fucks survivors that watched the first tetrapods crawling around in swamps and laughed off the extinction event that took out the dinosaurs. A little snow (or a lot of snow) is not enough to phase them.
There has always been good evidence that there USED to be beavers in and around the lake, but every year I find more evidence of where they're living right now...
This is quite fresh. This is what beavers do... eat the bark and then get down to the business of trying to gnaw down the tree, except that these beavers aren't building a dam, so they don't seem to bother to chew them all the way down.
This sapling victim is very fresh, and the gnawing away at the wood around a certain spot is what distinguishes beaver chomping from porcupine chomping. This sapling has been thoroughly girled and will probably fall within a year.
This one they didn't make much of an effort to chop down, but they did chew it up quite a bit and eat a good patch of bark. Trees are quite able to survive this, at least in the short term.
This poor fellow survived a previous beaver mauling and spent many years regrowing bark around the dead, gnawed trunk... and now the beavers have been back to chew on that!
I know not what kind of tree makes these pretty catkins but I will try to find out.
And if you can tell which of the branches on this tree actually belong to the tree and which belong to the grapevine that has twined in from the left, you have better eyes than me...
And that is all and I need a nap before dinner with people.
.
.
.