Morbid foreboding walk at Dedham Town Forest.
I went for a perfectly pleasant walk in the Dedham Town Forest today, but I got home and looked at my pictures and some of them are pretty off-putting. This first one is just an old sign indicating part of the "fitness trail," but it feels very foreboding to me. Be warned, this series includes at least one very unpleasant photograph.
A deer skull in the leaf litter is my standard representation of the Dedham Town Forest. Most of this piece of land is fenced in, but one section is open to a very busy highway. My friend who led the walk thinks that deer get hit on the highway, then walk the edge until they find their way into the forest at the open part, then collapse and die there.
It's certainly possible--we found the remains of at least 4 deer, 1 coyote, and one raccoon. This bone has been here long enough to provide habitat for some moss, and a whole mess of springtails.
Did somebody say springtails? You could have collected them by the bucketload, if you could think of a use for them. I just think they are cool, so I played with them and left them to reorganize.
Here's the group looking at the most impressive carcass of the day. Shall we look closer?
It's a coyote, and it's become the focus of a mating frenzy for hundreds of carrion beetles.
Let's look at this beautiful birch bark for a moment. Anyone know which species of birch it is? Perhaps you've bought Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast, as I hope to do soon. In fact there's a possibility that the author will lead an Urban Nature Walk soon!
On another chunk of birch, I found these little bumps--hardened packets of spores of the wolf's milk slime mold! Opened up they are very similar to tiny puffballs.
I found two specimens of this previously-new-to-me mushroom (actually my first time seeing one was at Drumlin Farm on the winter mushroom walk last Saturday). It looks like a regular cap and stem mushroom somehow ossified for the winter, but it is in fact a polypore (relative of all those hard or leather brackets on dead trees year round) that has evolved to take the same shape.
On our way out of the Forest, my friend called to me "Watch out for land mines, Jef!" I puzzled over this joke--were there piles of scat to avoid stepping in? What could she have meant. Then we got to the other side of this sign. Surely they mean "mines" as in mineral mines dug into the ground? But then the sign has the word "Army" on it (you can't see it in my picture but you can see it here.)
Oh well, foreboding and morbid as it was, the sun came out and the temperature rose into the 70s! The rest of the day was spent laying around the back yard playing with the puppy--but that's another post yet to come.