Wednesday, December 26, 2012

One Trail Twelves Times - December: A Study in Reds and Greens



December's One Trail Twelve Times walk was scheduled for December 16, but several days in advance the forecasters said that there was a good likelihood that we'd have rain that Sunday afternoon.  So, to ensure that I'd have a visual record of the Beech Springs Trail in December, I walked the trail to take photographs on Thursday afternoon, December 13.  Sunday afternoon wasn't rainy, but it was misty and foggy, and the small group of walkers decided to tackle the trail anyway despite the dampness - a good decision, because we all enjoyed this final episode of the series spanning twelve months.  When I returned from the trail,though, I downloaded the images I had taken with the group and realized that the setting on the camera had slipped and many of the images I had taken, especially early into the walk, were too dark.  So, the following Tuesday morning, December 18, I returned to the trail and recaptured some of the ruined images.  All this is to say that the images below are a compilation of the best images captured during three walks on the Beech Springs Trail this month.


The beginning of the trail in mature woods
The first year rosettes of invasive, non-native garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata); in the spring they'll bolt and produce thousands of seeds in sickle-shaped pods.


Soon after we entered the mature woodland at the beginning of the trail, I noticed Spotted Wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata) growing alongside the trail.  This handsome native ground cover is probably present year round, but simply lost amidst the Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) growing more vigorously on the forest floor.  We've undoubtedly walked by this plant 11 time before and never noticed it.  

In keeping with the theme, notice Spotted Wintergreen's red stem
Hips on multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) at the wood's edge
Sunday's walkers emerging from the woods into the foggy meadows
Blackberry leaves (Rubus spp.)
Another blackberry variation

Non-native and highly invasive porcelain-berry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) is my biggest invasive plant headache.  This Asian member of the grape family (Vitaceae) becomes established in a field when birds eat its fruit and defecate the seeds.  Then, the perennial vines clamber up anything that will support them (usually a tree), and the roots run underground and send up periodic sprouts, spreading the infection ever wider.  The roots become very, very thick and full of stored nutrients, so repeated cutting barely fazes the plant.  One it gains a foothold in a field like this, it is very difficult to control because broad-leaf herbicides that kill porcelain-berry kill all the desirable broad-leaf plants, too.

Tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera) samaras awaiting a strong, dispersing wind
View across the winter old-field

This is a porcelain-berry "knot" in the middle of the grassy trail.  I don't know what the technical botanical term of this feature is, but my staff and I call it a knot.  As I mentioned above, well-established porcelain-berry roots send up sprouts periodically, allowing this pernicious plant to colonize new areas.  The knots can have a half-dozen vine sprouts, each one trying to ascend into the forest canopy.  When we established the trail, we cut several of these root-sprout knots; repeated trail mowing has caused the sprouts to die back, but I'd bet that the roots below are still alive.

Lenticels on a bird cherry sapling (Prunus avium)

With nearly all the vegetation died back, I devoted quite a bit of time during the walk to searching for mantis egg cases attached to the stems of plants, but the only cases I found were attached to sweetgum saplings (Liquidambar styraciflua).  Though it was probably intuitive, such placement was good planning on the part of the the mantids because the herbaceous old-field vegetation will get mowed in early spring, while the saplings - and their attached egg cases - will be spared.

Red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) in the wet meadow

Dried fern fronds and a single sprig of Deer-tongue Grass (Panicum clandestinum) in the wet meadow
Silvery-white leaf in the wet meadow
Entering the woods on the opposite side of the old-field meadow
The toppled tree over the lower end of one of the spring runs; I've featured this tree during each month's post
The head of one of the springs, buried under fallen leaves
Skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) poking through the leaf litter

The trail's eponymous springs only run a few hundred feet through the forest before they discharge into a small, perennial tributary  of our main creek.  Though I've posted images of the springs before, I had yet to venture off trail to get images of the stream itself.

Most of the stream's watershed is developed, either with houses on large lots, or as part of a huge (40-acre) grassy field used annually for a fundraising carnival and horse show by our local hospital.  So, the stream is very "flashy" - bearing modest flows most of the time, but turning into a raging torrent during storms.  Water quality is not particularly bad, but the floods scour the stream bed, carry lots of suspended sediment, and erode the banks, so the stream is not really much of an aesthetic amenity.

Ferns amidst the flood-washed roots on the stream bank

The stream itself; note the extraordinarily wide channel in relation to the watercourse, all a result of the severe flooding the watercourse endures
Shades of gray on a white oak (Quercus alba)
Green-gray lichen on a fallen limb
The group decided that the striking red color on this limb was produced by a fungus

Shadows on an American beech (Fagus grandifolia)
One of the trees (in this case, a red oak [Quercus rubra]) brought down by Hurricane Sandy

Back out into the meadow
A luminous goldenrod (Solidago spp.) seedhead
Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) seed capsule
Wending through the meadow
A riot of reds (on blackberry canes)
Goldenrod galls, produced as a defensive mechanism by goldenrod plants when a goldenrod rod gall fly (or peacock fly) (Eurosta solidaginis) injects an egg into the plant's stem, are common throughout the meadow.  Once the egg hatches, the gall provides a cozy retreat in which the fly larva can overwinter.  However, not all the larvae make it through the winter; some fall victim to Downy Woodpeckers (Picoides pubscens), which cling to the dried stem and peck a hole into the gall to extract a juicy winter snack.  Most of the galls we inspected had been raided by a woodpecker, like this one had.

Another type of goldenrod gall
Prostrate dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) blooming in the trail
Suspended

6 comments:

packrat said...

Quite a passel of photos this time, Scott; all very interesting. I notice the face on the White Oak is missing a left eye. When I first saw the Goldenrod gall I thought it was the missing eye. Did you really want us to add a caption to that pic? Of all the images, I like the shadows on the American Beech best; it has a distinct Zen-painting quality to it.

Scott said...

Packrat: Thank you, as always, for your kind words. I didn't see the face in the trunk of the white oak (missing an eye or not); I just wanted to show the different grays on one tree. I took literally a dozen images of the American beech with the shadows and twigs because I liked the composition so much and wanted to really capture its essence; I'm not completely satisfied with the result, but I chose the best of the shots. About half of the images had a dried leaf hanging from one of the twigs, but I removed the leaf for the second set of images. The shots with the leaf had the leaf out of focus (because of the plane of the image), so I discarded those. And, with regard to the "Add caption," that was just my oversight in trying to get the post posted; thanks for the heads up--I'll edit that off.

We had rain and high winds all night last night, but no snow (except for a few flurries this morning as the system moved out). I'm so glad we were spared the worst of the storm, and I'm not planning to head north or west any time soon.

Anonymous said...

I really appreciate this "One Trail Twelve Times" effort. I find it very inspiring and plan to do something like it here in the Sierra Foothills. The photographs are lovely and really capture the essence of December. Lovely stuff.

Scott said...

Thanks for your feedback, Robin Andrea. I hope it does encourage you to replicate my efforts, and to share your results with the rest of us.

The few folks who stuck with me for most of the walks really encouraged me to repeat this series on another trail. I was/am sorely tempted because I enjoyed the program, but I think I'm going to take a break. I had to work my Sunday afternoons (at least one a month) around the walks and, while generally it wasn't a big deal, it did constrain Kali and me a bit. Plus, with the exception of one photographer who joined me religiously for most of the second half of the year, there were few other "regulars," and none of them was interested in photographing, sketching, or journaling like I had hoped. So, in summary, it was a mixed bag for me.

Joy K. said...

"Lenticel." A new word for me! Thanks for a lesson.

Scott said...

Joy: I'm glad I could help expand your vocabulary. My manual of "The Plants of Pennsylvania" defines a lenticel as "a corky pore in the bark of a stem."