flora – Page 5

Sunday Snapshots – Promises kept

Promises

I suppose it must simply be because of this early spring we’ve experienced this winter, all the snow gone by mid-March, but I seem to be getting ahead of myself this year. I was absolutely convinced that by this time last year the slope leading down to the water at the lake house had been carpeted in wildflowers. That I hadn’t yet seen any wildflowers here I attributed to the fact that we were slightly farther north, didn’t have same sort of nice exposed eastern slope, and – yes, I’ll admit it – I still miss the lake house and have a slightly biased view of it having been a better-quality habitat. Or richer in biodiversity, anyway. I hadn’t seen any evergreen hepatica leaves in our forest here, and so I just figured all those lovely spring wildflowers that I seemed to remember popping up at the cusp of April, the hepaticas and spring beauties and Dutchman’s breeches, must not occur around here.

I’m slowly coming to realize that, as much as I loved that spot, and it did perhaps have a slightly higher number of provincially rare species, much of what was found there I can also find here. I went out into the woods yesterday afternoon to see if there were any signs of spring ephemerals yet. Any at all, and I was fully prepared to not find anything, since, after all, I hadn’t spotted any hepatica and it should be visible as soon as the snow’s melted. I was pleased when I came across a patch of Trout Lily in one of the little patches of trees left in the middle of the first meadow. Just the leaves so far, the flowers will be a while to come yet. But it will still be nice to have that splash of colour on the forest floor.

I wandered through another patch of trees without seeing anything, and then ducked into an area that’s effectively just part of the expansive woods that fill the neighbour’s property, distinct only in that a cedar rail fence runs through it, half a dozen meters from the edge of the trees, defining the boundary between the two properties. I found some more Trout Lily, and then, a short distance away, some frilly leaves that I recognized at once. Dutchman’s Breeches! I looked more carefully, and sure enough there was another patch, and then another. One or two even had flower stems with half-formed flower buds on them, promising of good things to come. Oh, how exciting!

I pushed on, looking more carefully now. Probably they hadn’t been present a week ago when I wandered through, or maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right spots then, but now as I looked I discovered there was quite a bit of the wildflower. In one spot, on a fairly steep east-facing slope, there were even a couple of plants with nearly fully-formed flowers. That’ll teach me to doubt!

I found a few other things while searching the forest floor, too. I turned up two trilliums, this one with a flower bud. I don’t think of trilliums as blooming until two or three weeks after this other stuff, so this individual seems quite early to me. It looks like it will be a white flower – perhaps not a great surprise, as that’s the most common colour in our forests.

In a few spots there were these small, tapered leaves, growing in pairs, scattered in patches. I didn’t know what they were and I walked right by them at first. Then one caught my eye: it had flower buds! Looking more closely, it turned out that these were Spring Beauties, not yet opened. Another I hadn’t expected to see here! Neither the Dutchman’s Breeches nor the Spring Beauties grew in the mixed-wood forest where I grew up, and I’d come to regard them as a Carolinian species. I knew that pseudo-Carolinian habitat extended up from the Kingston area along the Frontenac Arch, where we were at the lake house, but figured we were too far north here for them, especially when there weren’t any hepaticas. I know, I know – I hinged quite a lot on the presence or absence of those hepaticas.

And finally, a flowering grass, which I almost passed by before I realized it was blooming. I’m not sure what species this is; I tried looking it up, but without success. There are just so many species, and searches are complicated by all the cultivated varieties available for gardens. So it will have to remain unidentified.

This afternoon I looked up my wildflower post from last year. Sure that it had been in the first week of April, I was surprised to discover I’d posted it on April 17. The photos used in it were taken on April 14. So we really are right on time this year.

Tree beards

Not far from the tree with the beetle engravings I discovered one with a tiny poof of lichen. Just the one, on a small tree that could even have been a long-dead sapling; there were no others near it, or even in the immediate area, that I could spot. I found this curious. At first I thought it was perhaps a reindeer lichen that had been picked up and dropped there by some animal, but when I picked it up it seemed to have grown around the twig, with a distinct groove down the centre. I ran off several shots, but lichens are a tough bunch to decipher, and I didn’t really know for sure what I was looking at.

I carried on up the trail, and a short distance later came upon some thick fruit-bearing trees, perhaps crabapples. I’d walked by these trees dozens of times before, and never noticed anything remarkable. But for whatever reason, that day something caught my eye: fuzzy patches of green lichen growing from their trunks. Whereas there’d just been the one on that first little tree, here there were dozens. None of them were very big, even the largest was not much larger than a tennis ball. Most were only half that size. They were very delicate and fine, almost hairlike. I had more of a suspicion as to the identity of these, but it would require returning home to ask the internet (my god is named Google; Google will provide).

I am fairly certain that these are Usnea sp., also known as Old Man’s Beard (which may refer to one of many species of Usnea lichen), or at the very least the latter bunch on the crabapples are. I’m not completely sure about the first one, I would probably need to go back to check out additional characteristics. Usnea lichens typically grow from the branches or trunks of trees, and are always fruticose – that is, highly branching. Some species grow more thickly than others, and some have broad flat bits that remind me a bit of opened venus fly trap jaws. There are a number of species that grow in Ontario, but I think this one might be Usnea subfloridana, a particularly filamentous species but one that doesn’t typically grow very large or long. Some species can grow very long, a foot or more, and completely cloak the branches of a tree.

All lichens are susceptible to air pollution, but Usnea lichens are especially so. They’re one of the first types of lichen to disappear with air pollution. Even when they persist, they may not grow more than a few millimeters. Their presence here is likely an indication of reasonably clear air quality.

When I think of Usnea, I typically think of Northern Parula warblers. Parulas are almost entirely dependent on long, draping species of Usnea for their nests. They don’t just use the lichen in the nest, the lichen is the nest. They’ll find a nice thick clump of the stuff and hollow out the inside. They don’t even always line it. Because the sort of Usnea the parula prefers mostly occurs in the coniferous forests of the Canadian Sheild, the bird is rare in southern Ontario. We’re right at the edge of the Shield here, but I don’t think these little puffs are going to cut it.

Most Usnea lichens, along with a few others such as reindeer lichen, contain usnic acid, a bitter-tasting molecule believed to be used to deter animals that might browse on the lichen (apparently it doesn’t deter the reindeer). It also happens to be a very potent antibiotic and antifungal agent, and is high in vitamin C. These latter properties resulted in it being a common medicinal agent used by Native Americans to treat infections – both internally, as a tea, and externally, as a compress on wounds. The fine, branching nature of the lichen also made it a good substitute for gauze. In modern day herbal medicine it is often used in teas or other products intended to treat respiratory and urinary tract infections.

All good things to know if I find myself lost and sick in the northern woods…

The most popular of 2009

Yesterday I highlighted what my favourite posts of the last year were, choosing one per month (and leaving out many that were probably just as worthy as a result). As a related idea, last year I also summarized what the most popular posts of the year were, and I thought I’d also do that again this year. WordPress keeps tabs not only on how many visitors your site gets, but also which pages they’re visiting. By far and away the page that gets the most visits is my home page, with the blog stats returning 33,333 hits in the last 365 days, as of this evening. My “About Me” page also gets quite a few. But what about the others? What are people looking for?

Well, most people are looking to find more about milk snakes. Although I don’t typically rank very high on the Google web searches, my photos can often be found on the first handful of pages of results for relevant search terms. I think this is how most people searching for milk snakes, or even just “snake”, arrive here. In a search for “eastern milk snake”, the above photo even makes the first page, and I suppose is different enough to catch people’s interest. A grand total of 7,861 people dropped by to check out the milk snake post.

Compared to the milk snake, all of the rest of my posts have a rather paltry visit count. The next closest, if you can still even call it close, is my grapevine beetle post. The above photo comes up on the first page of image results for “grapevine beetle”, and probably accounts for much of the traffic. There aren’t very many images on that first page that offer a sense of scale, so perhaps that’s why this one is interesting. Over the last year, this post got 2,139 people visiting.

Ranked number three, with just 1,509 hits, is my post on poison ivy. Given just how many pages there are out there about the subject, it’s surprising that it gets even that much regular traffic. It doesn’t come up on the first few pages of Google results.

Coming in fourth is my post on White Pines, the Tree of Great Peace. It collected 1,298 page views over the last year. It’s likewise a commonly discussed subject, so visitors must be coming by way of more detailed searches.

I’m a little surprised that my fifth-ranked post, about house centipedes, isn’t higher on the list considering how creepy most people find them. On the other hand, so many people find them creepy, there’s lots of web content about them. It had 1,292 hits.

Number six is about water bugs – a handful of species of invertebrates that I found in some pond water samples. Although the post mentions a number of species, I suspect many, if not most, of the 1,264 visitors were searching for info on blackfly larvae, the corresponding photo of which, above, comes up on the first page of Google image search results for the subject.

The seventh post, I’m delighted to say, is about a few colourful moths. Yay moths! I would hazard a guess that the particular moth most of the visitors were interested in was the Isabella Tiger Moth, above, which is the adult form of our very familiar Woolly Bear caterpillar. The above photo is the very first image returned for the Google image search “Wooly bear caterpillar moth” (number two if you spell woolly with two L’s). It’s had 1,235 visitors over the last year.

Some 1,185 people have come by to check out my post on flamingos. The post was titled “pink flamingos for the yard” and I’ve noticed a number of search terms on my stats pages indicating people looking for plastic lawn flamingos. These ones probably weren’t what they were looking for; they were captive birds kept by a neighbour down the road from my parents’ old house who bred them and sold them to zoological institutions.

I noticed that as soon as my post on snapping turtle eggs went up last June that it started getting a lot of hits. In just half a year it’s accumulated 1,149 page views. It’s a shame that the eggs I found had been depredated already, but hopefully the post at least offered some useful information.

And rounding out my top ten, the only other one with more than a thousand hits (1,007 total), was my post on giant water bugs. This one got picked up on a web forum – for video game animation or something weird like that – which still brings me periodic hits. The popularity, I think, is partly due to the post’s title, “monster bug”. One of the photos comes up on the second page of Google image results for that term.

It’s interesting to note that only two of these ten posts are actually from 2009: the white pine and the snapping turtle. All the rest are from 2008.

The best of 2009

Yesterday was my two-year “blogoversary”. (I actually thought today was, which is why I didn’t post yesterday; it was only in going back to review last year’s post that I realized my error.) I first put metaphorical pen to paper here at The Marvelous in Nature on January 12, 2008. It’s hard to believe two years have flown by already. Not including this one, I have written 449 posts here to date; 222 of those were since my one-year blogoversary post. That works out to about one every 1.6 days. This was probably boosted considerably by my habit of writing more frequently – sometimes up to five times a week – during the summer. I can’t sustain that sort of pace during the winter, when it’s more like one post every 2.3 days.

I thought in celebration of reaching the two-year mark I’d select my favourite posts from 2009 and re-share them here for those who might have missed them the first time, or would just like to enjoy them again. I did this last year, as well; for me, it’s fun to have a chance to review the past year and remember all of my interesting and exciting observations. Two-hundred twenty-two posts is a lot of writing; it was hard to select just twelve as my favourites, but I finally narrowed it down. So without further ado: the best of 2009!

January – I and the Bird #92 – The Picnic Party
I looked through all of my January posts from last year, and I had some interesting observations, but I finally settled on this one. I had a lot of fun when writing the poem, and I still have fun when I go back to read it. I’m hosting I and the Bird #117 next Thursday, nearly one year to the day from the picnic party edition.

February – The old man redpoll
We had a couple of Hoary Redpolls visit our feeders in February, and I discussed a bit about them, as well as identification tips to tell them from Commons.

March – A place to call home
While out wandering the woods with Raven I came across a female Pileated Woodpecker working on excavating her nest. She was very unconcerned with us, and kept working away even as I ran off dozens of photos from just below.

April – Wood frog love
While visiting some crown land north of the previous house I found a couple of female Wood Frogs being mauled by amorous suitors.

May – Flowers of the heart
Columbine are among my favourite wildflowers, and they were fairly common in the rocky habitat around the lake house. I hope we have some around here, too! We arrived too late last summer for them to still be in bloom. My sister got me one for my birthday last year, so I can enjoy them close to the house.

June – It’s a bug-eat-bug world
I collected up a number of photos of invertebrates I had encountered with prey (mostly spiders), and shared them together.

July – The plant that eats meat
Sundew are one of my favourite native plants, but are so rarely encountered because of their specialized habitat requirements that make them very local in distribution. I got a chance to check some out with the canoe on one visit to Rock Ridge this summer.

August – L’otter fun
One morning, while I was sitting at the banding site at the Rock Ridge MAPS station, a family of otters swam by, through the water lilies and along the small lake below.

September – Black and blue and wet all over
When our landlord came to shut down the pool for the summer, he found a Blue-spotted Salamander in the filter intake, and brought it to share with me.

October – Eau de la viande pourrie
My coolest mycological find of the year was this Netted Stinkhorn, one of a small handful I found over in the 100-acre woods.

November – Winterizing the brain
November’s a tough month for nature blogger – you’re suffering the post-summer letdown from the biological high you were riding for the last seven months, and in your slightly stupefied state of wildlife withdrawal it’s hard to come up with good content. As an exercise to help overcome the naturalist’s-block, I examine the small square of lichen-covered rock above.

December – All dressed in red
The cardinal that I first wrote about in this post still continues to grace us with his presence at the feeders. It’s good to see him doing so well!