The first thing to note about our forest is age. Not the centuries of the pacific northwest, granted, but our large trees tend to maple, ash and hickory, not fast-growing aspen and willow. I once encountered a large maple that had fallen long ago and played nursery log to several other maples, now grown just as big. Age is spoken by the lush undergrowth of native and knee-high skunk cabbage flourishing in the shade.

The second thing to note about the forest is that you are not entirely welcome guest. This is suggested by the delicate succulent stems popping up everywhere you want to step, and underscored by the scattered poison ivy that occasionally reaches up on vines toward you. I’ve read some things suggesting that even the native Americans who had lived in this area were not entirely comfortable in the deep forest.

The theme of this season is busyness, seen in the proliferation of green solar panels making sugars from sunlight. Every individual is a selfish, separate world, yet interconnected. Even the birds going about their business are more native than you though they may spend most of the year somewhere else. They’re following their own agendas. Phoebes are busy feeding young. Later-arriving eastern wood pewees are still plighting their troth, singing away even late morning when the phoebes are mostly silent. Then there are the migrators that find temporary solace here, like the blackpoll warbler which still has to travel north to the boreal forest before he can start breeding.

In the green world of the forest, I find solace from my own busyness.

On flowers

The trilliums have become ragged in the woods around our yard. Flowers are a study in impermanence. We often conflate the flower with the plant, but a flowers is merely a means to an end - sexual reproduction. A flower is a free loader on the leaves, roots and stems that pay their way. Many of our forest flowers don't even bother with the business of sexual reproduction until they've established themselves as a root system. The thick patches of mayapple in our forest are mostly the result of colonization by underground rhizomes - i.e. asexual reproduction. An individual may labor at this honest work for four years or so before entering the sordid world of flowers, pollinators, and seeds.

In the relatively stable environment of the deep forest, there's a good chance that a site which was hospitable last year will be the same this year, whereas seed set and dispersal is more risky. Sexual reproduction is a luxury in the short term. Jack-in-the-pulpit decides how much energy to spend based on its age and condition. Younger or stressed plants make male flowers , while older and more healthy plants can invest in female flowers which will also entail producing costly seeds and berries.

Many flowers are alluring to our eyes with their colors and symmetry, even though we are not the intended audience when it comes to wildflowers. Jack-in-the-pulpits are easy for humans to overlook, but their attraction to insect pollinators come from a mushroom-like odor which fools gnats into entering by mistake. Ultimately a flowering plant has its own agenda, and one can't believe all its pretty promises.

My childhood was spent in suburbia among house sparrows and dandelions. As a result, sometimes native species seem more exotic than the invasives. Scarlet tanagers bring a dash of the tropics to our temperate deciduous forests, although this is appropriate since they spent our winter in South America. Flowering skunk cabbages seem to belong to some alien planet. Later blooms like jack-in-the-pulpit defy a simple flower diagram.



Mayapple is one of my favorite plants to watch. I noticed it last month popping out of the ground leaves and all, like little umbrellas.



They've only just begun blooming, but you have to crouch down to discover the subtle pleasure of their concealed flowers.

Spring foliage

This is the first year I've noticed that the colors of emerging leaves evoke the colors of the autumn leaf show. The colors are more pastel, but no less beautiful to me.



Many of the colors have been diluted since these pictures were taken a couple weeks ago. We still see yellows and oranges at the edges of the forest, but the leaves around our house surround us in a curtain of emerald green.

April flowers - Part 2

May has hit its stride, but I wanted to revisit April before too much time passes. Our Internet connection was glacially slow that month, but out in the forest things were moving at a fast clip. Fortunately my camera was still working well.

Taking certain pictures turned out to be tricky. I've never learned much about photography, so it was only this year that I realized that flower pictures taken during lower light conditions are better than those taken with the sun high in the sky on a cloudless day. However, spring flowers don't open randomly. Many stay closed when the air temperature is too cool for pollinators to be flying around, such as during mornings, evenings, and cloudy days when my camera was all ready to record their beauty. Even when I was out when the flowers where still open but the sunshine had started to fade, blossoms would be drooping instead of all facing in the same direction.

Then there's the short blooming period. This bloodroot flower will pollinate itself if cold weather or other factors inhibit insect pollination so it can move along to seed formation.



The speckled leaves of trout lilies carpet many areas of the forest floor and even the edges of our lawn, but only plants old enough to have two leaves will flower. I watched the buds for days, waiting for them to open, then could only look on as they opened so wide in the blazing spring sunlight that the petals touched in back. The few pictures I did take were nice but not as impressive.



Finally, five days before the end of April, waves of trillium opened. Perhaps because temperatures had warmed, I haven't noticed trilliums to close, making them ideal subjects for me to photograph.

Brave new spring

The forest in spring is the forest primordial. Everything seems new and untouched, especially by humans. This morning I set out with my camera into the forest gleaming with the remnants of overnight rain. I stepped gingerly over carpets of single trout lily leaves. Islands of lush blue cohosh and wild leeks rose from the leaf litter, populated with scattered native flowers like trilliums and mayapples.

I had been wandering and snapping random pictures for while when I stumbled across a familiar tall plant with white flowers – garlic mustard, an invasive species we tend to find near the road and along our driveway. Aghast, I spent the next ten minutes or so pulling every plant I could find, both tall and tiny, trying hard to coax all their roots from the wet soil. Finally I set out towards home with a wad of fragrant plant material held tight in one hand.

Except that I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. After casting about for a bit, I ended up having to cross through an unfamiliar stream bed. This area was wreathed in the most brilliant green. Huge skunk cabbage and young jewelweed decorated the hillocks where fern heads were unfurling. Horsetails stuck out of the dark, still water, glistening with rain drops. And there I was, stomping through this prehistoric scene like Godzilla, clutching a whole mess of invasive species which had not managed to reach this oasis on their own.

As far as I know I didn’t drop any, but this incident reminded me that sometimes we are the most immediate danger to these woods. All I can hope is that by managing invasives when we can, we are doing more good than harm.

The change in daylight hours is driven by the orientation of the earth in relation to the sun. The changes in the plant community on the forest floor, while ultimately due to this relationship, are shaped by more local factors. April began with an almost barren canopy except for evergreens. Someone fair-skinned such as myself had no refuge from the sun in the middle of a hot, cloudless day. Today the forest rivals autumn leaf shows for beauty. New growth, especially in the understory, gives the forest a green blush. Yellow and white flowers remain along with more showy flowering trees in peoples' yards. The deep red flowers of red maples have become orange clusters of winged fruit. Willows drape long yellow locks over the pond at work, betraying green roots as the leaves come in.

This is the timeline which spring flowers are constrained by - the return of the summer canopy. They need enough warmth and sun to grow flowers and attract pollinators (although some species have ways around the latter problem). But if they flower too long and the trees cast them into shade, they won't have enough energy to produce fruit. Many spring flowers respond by being ephemeral, which is a poetic way to say short-lived. They grace the forest floor with a burst of beauty before melting away.

April flowers - Part 1

The change in daylight hours happens more quickly around the equinoxes. Similarly, change in the forest seems to have moved at a lightning pace since the spring equinox on March 20th. Even early April was a different world. Plants that littered the forest everywhere one looked have been completely altered, yielding the stage to the next eye-catching flower. At first skunk cabbage had the most obvious reproductive structure.



Now these gnome hoods have been replaced by lush leaf spreads.



The first of the more stereotypical flowers were the small white or purple flowers of hepatica I noticed tucked among the leaf litter on April 3.



In mid-April, while hepatica was wide open in a last burst of color before turning to seed pods, the real diversity began to emerge. One native among many was blue cohosh, whose stems rose in stooped forms reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss book.



Blue cohosh has settled in after a couple weeks, retaining just a tint of blue as it mingles with the trilliums and mayapples that dominate the forest floor.



To be continued...

In my haste the other day, I forgot to mention another native species with blooms evident in the forest: red maple. The tight red buds clustered at the end of branches have opened into sprays of white stamens or pistils, depending on whether the flower is male or female. It's easy to forget that most of our deciduous trees are technically "flowering plants" because the seeds are more noticeable than the flowers. Maybe this is because the seeds fall to our level, whereas one might not notice flowers high up in branches if they weren't already looking up through binoculars. Primarily wind-pollinated, red maple blooms before the canopy leafs out and impedes air flow, which also makes the event easier to observe. in a complex ecosystem such as the northeastern forest, resources such as light, pollinators and air space have many users. One way many organisms avoid competition is through timing.

Signs of spring

Outside, everyone is singing. Including myself on days when I can't resist bringing the guitar out to play in the warm air under blue skies. A month ago I was stopped in my tracks by a red-winged blackbird belting out "cor-a-lee," but now flocks of noisy blackbirds and grackles seem to be everywhere. An American robin that claimed our yard spends his time whistling from various trees. Eastern bluebirds and meadowlarks serenade the fields when we walk Bear on our free mornings.

Even though birds are on the move and green has broken out on the ground, ice still clings on in the shadows and during colder days. We have crocuses and coltsfoot flowering in our yard, but the only signs of native flowers I've seen in the forest so far are the gnome-like hoods of skunk cabbage popping up in and along our stream. These plants are related to tropical species which use metabolic heat to amplify their smell, often one reminiscent of rotting meat, in order to attract their pollinators, often flies. Operating on the principle that it's easier for the forces of evolution to modify an existing trait for a new task than to mutate an entirely new trait, the heat generated by flowering skunk cabbage melts through ice and snow as well as encouraging pollinators to visit.

Amphibians have also awoken. Spring peepers, like wood frogs, actually hibernate close enough to the air to partially freeze, using glucose as anti-freeze in vital parts of their bodies. The chorus of spring peepers has been hard to miss, although actually seeing the tiny frogs requires effort. They gather around the temporary pools that form on the other side of our property from the stream and the wet land around it. Some warm night soon I hope to head out with a flashlight and search for peepers and other amphibians. The problem is that spring has also meant spring cleaning for us - a massive cleaning out of our house in preparation for a complete rebuild. This also has meant that our internet connection at home has gone from slow to non-existent. I will try to keep writing online through this exciting time of new beginnings, but no promises.

World under ice

[written yesterday]
That taste of spring has left me feeling anxious and confined. Especially on days like today when the trees are all swaying in the wind, sometimes gently, other times violently thrashing about. I readily admit to being overly cautious, but then windthrow is a major disturbance affecting our forests. Our local forest has many standing dead trees, beech trees rotting inside from beech bark disease, and wet areas where shallow-rooted trees occasionally fall over, root system and all. There's been several times we've found our driveway blocked by tree trunks of various sizes.

So I just feel better not being under several tons of wood doing the wave. Which is too bad, since otherwise a walk would be great. The sky is cloudy but the sun regularly shines through the haze. The temperature, while brisk, is pleasant enough as long as you work up some body heat.

This brings up the another issue - other than hauling firewood, there's not much work I can do outside yet. There's no use skiing on the melted clumps of snow remaining, which would be a great way to appreciate the last few weeks of winter. I'm ready for spring garden work, but the world outside seems stuck in between seasons. With the loss of snow cover, the ground has lost its insulating layer. It and all the small bodies of water around us are caught up in a freeze/thaw cycle that seesaws with the sunlight and temperature.



The snow loss has also exposed many bits of greenery hugging the ground, from moss and ferns to rosette leaves of perennial and biennial plants. Ready for action, they nevertheless can find themselves held in suspended animation by the ice.



It feels like we're all stuck waiting for next month, when at some point the ground will thaw and we can all start taking full advantage of the lengthening days. I will finally get to dig compost into my garden beds and actually plant seeds into the still cold ground - peas, spinach and radishes which can take the cold and frosts. I will also be on the lookout for the first flower of spring. Skunk cabbage flowers use their own metabolism to create a warm microclimate for themselves and their pollinators.


[the picture above is of a skunk cabbage leaf bud]

For such a short month, February can last so long.

Seeds of Summer

The aster flowers of late summer and fall have been replaced by seeds attached to fluff poised to catch the wind.


Pokeweed, though its size can make it seem more shrub-like than herb-like, is not a woody plant. The above ground greenery dies and dries out under the stress of fall frosts. The seeds in these berries may find a hospitable site to germinate and survive long enough to make new plants, but this individual plant will have many more chances to reproduce. Right now its thick taproot stores the energy needed to grow a new set of stalks and flowers for the coming summer.



These berry-like structures are reproductive parts of another plant which withers in the fall frosts, a trait reflected in its common name: sensitive fern. The hard fertile fronds of the sensitive fern are easy to see in wet areas during winter since they remain upright, often poking out of the snow. They hold not seeds but spores. Ferns, along with related horsetails and clubmosses, have an extra generation in their life cycle because the spores give rise to something called a gametophyte, which is physically different from our conception of what a fern should look like. It's almost as if our eggs and sperm went on to be beings separate from us before uniting their genes and making a new, genetically normal human being. But relying on the fate of wind-dispersed spores can be risky business, and like so many other native woodland plants, sensitive ferns hedge their bets by spending the winter as a rhizome ready to sprout again in spring.

February Thaw - part 2

Wednesday

A little while after a cloudy dawn I was dropped of at a little nearby town to wait for a ride to work. The melt has continued, leaving patches of snow on our lawn and bumpy sheets of ice to step on under our car. In town, the creek that runs through a gorge underneath the main road is engorged by melt and rain. The brown waters churn and swell against their banks.

Brush spills down the sides of the gorge. European starlings perch in the surrounding trees and power lines, creating an exotic soundtrack that seems vaguely tropical. House sparrows, another European import, dart among the bramble. Periodically pigeons parasail high above, soaring between buildings with their wings held in rigid Vs.

It's a North American scene older than I am, yet fairly recent in evolutionary time. A single native species joins the ruckus when a couple blue jays fly in. One finds a big bread crumb and perches to eat it. It's an opportunistic community, brought together by their ability to live among such a messy species as us humans. Right now we all feel captivated by the weather.

February Thaw - part 1

Tuesday

The ice at work is slowly melting. The pond is like a Mars landscape, fields of dirty yellow with red accents and everywhere pockmarked by old deer prints. Chickadees twitter back and forth across the paths, seemingly excited by the warmth.

A robin song draws me away from the water, and I find the singer sitting with another robin a little ways off from a flock. Maybe it was a male thinking about claiming territory, but robins can sing occasionally throughout the winter and both birds flew back toward the flock after a while. These bursts of song are just preludes to the main event when the forests will bustle with the serious business of mate-finding and territory defense. I'm not the only one who tastes spring in this temporary thaw.

These robins have been flocking for at least a week in this area of young trees and exotic shrubs. The branches of alien buckthorn here are still laden with wrinkled black berries which also sustain a different flocking bird, the cedar waxwing. I find myself in the midst of a huge congregation. Every movement I follow with my binoculars finds another cluster of waxwings adorning slowly moving branches. These are one of my favorite birds. Their bodies are silky brown and they wear velvet black masks. They bring splashes of color to the brown landscape - yellow tipping their tail and waxy red gracing the tips of their wings. (You can see a picture here. I don't have a good lens for taking bird pictures yet). The air hums with their buzzing calls, almost as if I'm standing under a transformer on a utility pole.

I watch some birds pluck berries from the buckthorn, while others rest on bare branches. The waxwings flock and eat mostly fruit all year long, but the flocks that will spend the summer in our area will be much smaller than this. This is another sneak preview to the big migration push in spring when so many more species will gather in flocks along their migration routes.

Winter waning

Living on mostly solar power, we have developed a plant's appreciation of the sun. Not just sunlight itself, but its duration and intensity. Now we're about a month and a half from the Solstice, when day length was the shortest and the apex of the sun's trajectory the lowest of the year. The earth has actually been moving farther away from the sun since early January, but the combination of the earth's orbit and tilt means that we are tipping back toward our star.

As I wrote this yesterday, the clouds veiled the sun high overhead, but the happy hum of power coursing through our solar powered system makes me wish I had more use for electricity. Other creatures are also enjoying the relatively warm day. The dogs are romping outside and mixed foraging flocks of chickadees, titmice, nuthatches and woodpeckers are making a raucous noise. Back on the other side of Solstice when temperatures were dropping, leaves were also in various stages of falling. In general, spring in the forest is sunnier than autumn.

Of course we're still in the middle of solar winter with a month and a half to go til the vernal equinox. Even last Sunday when temperatures dallied in the 50's and I unearthed a slowly moving spider, a layer of snow and ice hid the ground. Bulbs and rhizomes are waiting for the ground to unfreeze so they can shoot up and flourish before the leaves return and the canopy again obscures the power of the sun.

Signs of life - part 2

Winter reveals the lives around us. Deer tracks lead to deer beds frozen in the snow. The early songs of chickadees and titmice ring out in the cold air with little competition while they dance among denuded branches. A longer-term record exists in the nests exposed by the lack of foliage. This is a good time of year to examine that record, not only because many are no longer shielded from view but because there are no parents around to scare from their nesting attempts.



The builders of some of these nests, such as the vireo nest above, deal with winter by avoiding it. We may think of the red-eyed vireo as a local bird, but evolutionarily it is a tropical species that breeds in our temperate forest, probably due at least in part to our abundant insect populations in the summer. The winter vireo lives a very different life in South America - flocking instead of defending territories, eating almost exclusively fruit instead of mostly insects. When the vireos arrive back in late April or May, they may use some bark strips from this nest to construct their new one, but they most likely will not use this nest again.

Most smaller birds don't regularly reuse nests, although large raptor nests may be reused year after year, not always by the builder. Great-horned owls in particular do not build their own structures, so they will occupy anything from a crow nest to a heron nest to a hawk nest. Cavity nests are one form of smaller nest which, being sturdy and safer than stick nests, are sometimes reused. For example, the cavity below may have been excavated by a chickadee, then reused by a titmouse or nuthatch. One of the benefits of observing nests in the summer is that there is a chance to answer such questions as who exactly used this nest or were the birds successful. However, there is the risk that if you continuously visit a nest, even if you don't scare the parents you may lead predators to the nest either by your actions or by the scent trail you leave behind.



Chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches can all easily be found in winter foraging flocks. Another species which is still around but more elusive are American robins. Many migrate farther south, but some take their chance on finding enough food to survive the northern winter. Like vireos, they change their behavior to become birds which wander in flocks and feed mostly on fruit. A couple of weeks ago a flock of robins descended on trees near my office, and I haven't encountered them since.



This nest, still shielded by evergreen needles, is a reminder of when robins were territorial and family-minded. The outside weave appears to be loosening, but the form is intact. Bird nests must be maintained throughout their use. As the winter progresses, wind, snow, and freezing rain take their toll. One robin nest I found had been reduced to just the inner mud cup. So maybe the best time to look at nests is next winter, soon after the leaves have fallen and the birds have transitioned into their winter lives.

(Note - it is illegal to collect bird nests without a permit. This is a good thing because even if someone says they collected the nest in winter, there's no way to verify that that is true.
Besides, nesting material may be reused even if nests are not.)

Keeping warm

It's been longer than a week since my last post - sorry about that. My job requires staring at a computer for 8 hours a day, so at home it can be blissful to completely ignore the laptop. The northeast was in the grips of arctic temperatures last week, therefore much of my time at home lately has been dominated by hauling in wood and feeding the fire. Some nights our task has been to keep the house over 60 degrees (F) warmer than our surroundings.

Snowshoeing through the woods with a freezing wind on my face, it occurred to me that my body was using metabolism and insulation to stay 90 degrees above the air temperature. Everything may be one in a spiritual sense, but life depends on staying separate. As well as temperature, we maintain specific balances of water and salts, not to mention organic chemicals, which are very different from the environments we inhabit.

Cold temperatures are a fact of winter which any organism must deal with to live here. Some avoid the stress by taking on a different difficult endeavor: migration. Others rely on food to stay warm and active, such as the ubiquitous gray squirrels and the chickadees that chatter as they forage in our spruce stand. Still others, such as many insects, wait out the winter. Insects are the most diverse group with this strategy, but they're not the only one. Frogs and toads hibernate underground and wood frogs even freeze completely, yet revive in the spring. They pack their cells with glucose to prevent ice crystals from damaging them while allowing ice to form between the cells. Toads stay under the frost line, which allows them to keep their bodies a few degrees above freezing. Unfortunately they sometimes hibernate in garden beds, and last spring I dug up a rather large, pale specimen (I didn't think to follow its fate at the time).

Some mammals can't count on finding enough of the right kind of food all winter. Chipmunks are larger than some migrating birds, but long-distance travel on the ground is too time-consuming and dangerous. Keeping warm is difficult with a tiny body even compared to other squirrels, so chipmunks burrow underground where they maintain a body temperature around 40 degrees Farenheit. For the energy they still require, the burrow is stocked with food hauled in the chippy's big cheeks - especially important in the unpredictable beginning of spring.

Another rodent whose green food stores poorly takes a different strategy. We no longer see roly-poly ground hogs grazing along the interstate. Instead they too are hibernating and making good use of all that fat to fast until the world is again dressed in green. Sometimes I wish I could do the same. But we can take one lesson from the ground hog in light of the recent holidays and frigid temperature - it's not necessarily a bad idea to add a few pounds for the winter.