What: It feels so good to break out Newcomb's Wildflower Guide once again! The spring ephemerals have already emerged and are starting to blossom. Their vibrant greens have given me pause, and I've been thinking about what exactly it means to be a spring ephemeral - what adaptations I'd need to survive. If I were an ephemeral I'd want nutrient rich soil to fuel quick growth, some gnarly chemicals to prevent browsers from gobbling up the first green thing they'd seen in 6 months, a bulb, rhizome, or root that could store copious amounts of energy to emerge quickly in the first warm weather of spring, to be small so growth didn't require excessive energy or time, to reproduce vegetatively in case it was a cold spring and insect pollinators weren't out, and a way of attracting pollinators. So there are definitely some adaptive patterns between our different ephemerals that all allow them to take advantage of that brief moment in a year when the ground is warm and the maple leaves still share the branches with the flowers.
Oh, and a spring ephemeral refers to herbaceous perennial plants (above ground parts die back each year) that have a lifespan shorter than the growing season, usually less than two months in April and May. They have to emerge, leaf out, flower, and go to seed before the canopy closes in and blocks out the shade. I'll be posting updates on spring ephemerals over the next couple of weeks as they continue to emerge in the Burlington area.
The one pictured above is a skunk cabbage (Symplcarpus foetidus). Naturalists love to note this plant's ability to generate its own heat to warms itself up on the cold late winter/early spring days to jump start its growth. I was fascinated by the rotting smell of its flower and swarm of blue bottle flies (Calliphora vomitoria) circling around (pictured above). The ravine I was in grades from ash/maple/oak to hemlock/yellow birch. There's considerably less skunk cabbage 'neath the hemlocks, and the few that were there were considerably further behind in terms of development.
Where: I was finding the skunk cabbage on small flood banks of a brook at Red Rocks. Soils were very silty sands, enriched from calcium rich bedrock upslope. Also seemed higher density in alluvial areas where movement downslope (not just downstream) was enriching the soil.
What: Full on outbreak of the boxelder bugs (Boisea trivittata). Coincides with the flower buds on the female boxelders (Acer negundo) bursting open. Ecological notes: These population booms are (primarily) associated with female boxelder trees. But then again, a single boxelder tree is only mostly female or mostly male, meaning that on a single tree you can find both male and female flowers, just with one sex being in the vast majority (the fancy term is polygamodioecious). I heard the bugs before I spotted them. It's been so dry here that their rustling in the leaves made them sound much louder than they actually were. At first I thought (and hoped) it was a hibernacula of snakes waking up in the warm (60o) weather. Alas it was not.
Once I spotted the culprit (actually hundreds and hundreds of culprits) my interest was piqued. I'd watched some type of fly by the lake mating yesterday, with their rears touching and the boxelder bugs took the same posturing. The males are the larger of the two and have much brighter orange bellies. They more or less dragged the females over the rocks. Pairings seemed to last anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes or so. Where: The bugs were lining the train tracks where North Ave crosses over (by the Donahue Sea caves). The whole stretch of the tracks between North and 127 is lined with boxelders, both male and female. The bugs were mostly along the rocks between the rail lines and the horsetails where it was the warmest.
Other notes: I didn't spot any eggs, but the females will deposit them in the bark of the boxelder. Once they hatch, these little guys have a gradual metamorphosis. They can't fly when they're young but develop wings as they get older (the young look like red aphids). Supposedly they eat boxelder seeds. I'd seen lots and lots of seeds this winter on boxelders that had little holes bored into them - I'm not sure if that was from these insects.
What: I've been watching the tamaracks (these are European Larch, Larix decidua) from a distance emerge into spring with this odd yellowish color. These little spur shoots have stacks of rings indicating previous year's growth.
Ecological notes: I climbed the tree to take a photo of the storm clouds dropping rain to the east over the Green Mountains. This patch of 3 larches are part of a larger plantation of trees adjacent to Centennial Field. As such they've got great lower limbs for climbing. I boosted myself up an all too healthy buckthorn and took these photos about 40' up one of the larches. The wind wasn't even that strong today but still made me uneasy - life in the sun ain't that easy (see video for a poor attempt to capture what caused my uneasiness). After about 20 minutes the two crows that I'd seen yesterday with nesting materials flew over and made a ruckus. With my arms hugging the bole like a frightened koala I twisted my head to watch them dip acrobatically down into the valley below. As the crows disappeared I spotted an old nest!! Or a new nest?!
Larch branches seem to break quite readily. In fact the whole tree has this appearance of someone who barely made it out of bed. Snapped branches litter the lower limbs, latent buds burst from every fissure on the bark, the bark turns a dead scraggly gray and flakes readily, and the new growth is a sickly grayish white. Yet it maintains it's own elegance (though certainly, at least to me, this peaks in the fall when it, unique among conifers, drops its needles. And so the crows' shabby little nest blended in perfectly with the dishelved backdrop. But again my mind wandered to the wind. On the edge the trees were like sails, and would be worse once the leaves fully emerged. Crows obviously don't get motion sickness. But imagine the nestlings - in a nest that barely has sides to it - perched up there in a good wind storm.
Where: Most of the larch in the Champlain Valley are plantation European varieties, these being no exception. There's one other European larch that I know of in Centennial Woods and it's a bit bigger than these - though I don't know exactly how old they are.
Other notes: I've found my desire to want to know challenged by my want to experience. While driving home tonight, the sunset was beautiful, and I thought of stopping at Overlook Park and snapping a photo, but didn't. I couldn't imagine trying to explain away the pink fire swallowing the horizon with the physics of light scattering.
And I started this blog in part to confront much of the misinformation about natural history (or at least plagiarism) rampant on the internet. One source quotes an esoteric piece of information from another source and then another source quotes the second, changes the text a bit, drops the citation, posts it and this gets reposted and changed to suit the new author's needs. Pretty quickly the initial attribution is dropped and nobody really knows the original source. Take the etymology of Tamarack (and alias for Larch, more properly applied to L. laricina, our native larch). Tamarack is supposedly a bastardized version of hackmatack, the Abenaki word for "wood good for snowshoes." In this case the original source is Charlotte Erichsen-Brown's 1979 book Medicinal and Other Uses of North American Plants, and even she doesn't cite her source (I don't have access to Gordon Day's Abenaki Dictionary so I can't verify this).
So now everyone can run around and say, Oh yeah, larch is great for making snow shoes without having actually tried. Hopefully most of what you'll read here is less recapitulation of other people's speculation and more (mis)information that at least comes from first-hand experience.
Ecological notes: Yet another gloomy day with temperatures in the mid 40s. It rained on and off through out the day and the soil was soft with fresh rain. I stumbled off the trail and noticed these bright red cups underneath a layer of maple leaves. I had never seen this species before. The small fruit bodies have brilliant red insides with a lighter beige color on the outside. The texture is rough and the cup waves in and out small enough to fit a pigeons egg.
Where: The forest behind Shelburne Pond
Other notes: The edibility of the Scarlet Elf Cup is unknown but it was used as a medicinal plant throughout history by the Oneida Indians. The fungus was dried, ground up and used as a styptic. It was also used for the navels of newborns after the umbilical cord was cut in order to heal it properly. Fruit bodies were used under bandages made of tanned deer skin. The fruit bodies have also been a noted food source for rodents in the winter and slugs in the summer.
Ecological notes: I took the above photographs this afternoon around 1 pm in the woods at Shelburne Pond. Although I am not 100% positive I believe the buds to be a Sugar Maple (although I had previously thought Red Maple). The branching is opposite and I found a decent amount of maple leaves blanketing the ground. It was a gloomy day today and I found my eyes shifting to the tiny pops of color in the woods, a reminder that bloom is just around the corner. This particular tree was very young and I studied the buds carefully noticing the beautiful red and green hues. I am amazed how long I have gone in and out forests without really noticing the amazing beauty of one single bud. It really captures all of the feelings of shifting seasons from winter to spring.
Where: Forest at Shelburne Pond
Other notes: Sugar maple is a native species to hardwood forests of North America. It is beautiful during fall foliage and may be best known for . It is common among most types of soils (besides sand) and is the most shade tolerant of large deciduous trees. On young trees, the twigs like the one I have photographed above, are a reddish brown color. As the tree gets older its bark becomes darker and more rough in texture. The fruit of this tree is called a samara, which is an important food source for birds, squirrels, and other rodents. The Sugar Maple is well known for its maple sugar sap which provides us with delicious maple syrup. The earliest written accounts of maple sugaring were made in early 1600s by European explorers who observed Native Americans gathering maple sap. Its bark is often used for furniture and musical instruments like the guitar and violin.
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
