Category: In the Field

Leta was a good sport and went along with me on a New Year’s Day walk in Great Falls Park. I hadn’t expected that the trails would be muddy (we were just wearing sneakers, on our way to a party at Tel’s), so we picked our way more carefully than usual. And once we’d been to the Matildaville ruins (always a bit of a letdown), I hadn’t expected that Leta would want to scooch down the river trail. But we did, and I found some nice patches of Wild Oats to show her. And I think that my mystery plant, still in fruit, was Sweet Cicely.

She liked the floods marker post.

I dropped by the park to check on the progress of the wetland restoration project. To my untrained eye, it looks like the builders are almost done with the new dam. New plantings are in place, and deadfall has been dragged into strategic positions. The scattering of Green-winged Teal and Northern Pintail in the main pond seemed unconcerned. The clashing of Common Grackles that would fly over from time to time likewise.

The surprise for this trip was this spindly, feisty Common Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana), spotted in a wet spot near the “phoebe bridge” where the trail begins to cross the wetland via boardwalk. Despite the fact that it’s in the process of being strangled by a blue-berried climber (Japanese Honeysuckle, perhaps), it has managed to produce fruit: look at the extreme right edge of the image for ripening persimmons, as well as a cluster left where the branches are obscured by the much larger lichen-covered maple.

A different sort of management project at the Park today: the central wetland has an overabundance of Cattail (Typha sp.). This is definitely a native, but it can be invasive. And it’s not as if we are facing a monoculture; it’s just that we have a lot of the stuff. With the rearrangement of ponding as a result of the wetlands restoration project, the professional management staff is concerned lest the well-established patch expand into the nearby woods that will soon be flooded. So they asked the RMV team to help out. The objective of today’s work was not to reduce the patch, but rather to discourage it a bit—to keep it in check.

We spent a couple of hours clipping the tops of the plants, removing the mature fruits, many of which are already distributing seed. Good weather, great snacks as always from M.K., and many, many bags of cattail heads.

I thought I could leave the botany alone for a week, but apparently not. I found Quince (Cydonia oblonga) ripening in the medieval herb garden at The Cloisters (left) and Castor Bean (Ricinus communis) (right) also coming into fruit.

(By the way, the Cuxa Cloister is now on the list of my favorite quiet places in New York. Truth to tell, any of these quadrangular spaces would be a great place for contemplation.)

Crossing Central Park from museum to museum, I found a very tall Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum biflorum) (or possibly a cultivar or import) bearing fruit.

Three very satisfying field trips at the Virginia Native Plant Society annual meeting, hosted by the Jefferson chapter (Charlottesville).

Saturday morning we looked mostly at mushrooms with Mary Jane Epps at Preddy Creek Trail Park. Notice the word “trail” in the property’s name: we often found ourselves making way for mountain bikes, as well as one rider mounted on a horse. We found Old Man of the Woods (Strobilomyces floccopus) mushrooms, an nondescript and unidentified slime mold, a tiny rove beetle on a Lactaria mushroom, some fine examples of Pinesap (Monotropa hypopithys) (at left), and Polyporus mori (at right).

In their walks, both Devin Floyd and Tom Dierauf emphasized the subtle shifts in species composition that can be attributed to aspect and drainage, as when an oak-hickory forest on one side of a slope gives way to an ash-tuliptree forest on the facing side. Devin (co-founder of the Blue Ridge Discovery Center) took us through the Secluded Farm tract of the Monticello property. Bonus champion tree for this walk: the North American champion Blackhaw Viburnum (Viburnum prunifolium), mistaken for many years for an apple tree. Counterintuitive fun fact: Slippery Elm (Ulmus rubra) leaves are not slippery, but rough as sandpaper.

Back to the north side of Albemarle (a two-syllable word in the local parlance) County for a visit to Ivy Creek Natural Area with Tom. Tom’s looks at the woods with a forester’s eyes, so we looked at a lot of trees in various stages of growth and decay, and we forgave his references to “Yellow Poplar.” He pointed out several examples of Red Hickory (a/k/a Oval Pignut Hickory) (Carya ovalis), a tree that he describes as very common in Virginia, and often overlooked. It’s certainly been overlooked in my prior field instruction, as we only had learned C. tomentosa, C. cordiformis, and the closely related Pignut Hickory (C. glabra). He gave me the idea for a little field experiment to perform in my weedy back yard: an oak cut back to the ground can resprout from its root underground, but a maple can’t. Tom showed us a single Paulownia tomentosa tree, in the process of being shaded out by taller trees, and spoke of the tree’s economic value rather than its potential invasiveness. He’s much more concerned about the depredations of Oriental Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) at Ivy Creek.

An atmospheric image of the bark of an older Black Birch (Betula lenta) beginning to peel. Tom took a small scraping from a younger tree: the inner bark smells intensely, wonderfully like Clark’s Teaberry gum.

We did take a look at the herbaceous layer. This Cut-leaved Grape Fern (Botrychium dissectum) was quite nice.

Friday, on my way down to the Charlottesville area for the Virginia Native Plant Society annual get-together, I took a side trip to Shenandoah NP and a loop hike from the Doyles River parking area to Browns Gap and back. The Appalachian Trail in certain sections was almost completely overrun by smartweed.

I hadn’t planned on looking at butterflies, so I did not bring my field guides—and so I had some interesting (if common) lepids to look at. Making field notes and taking photos of what turn out to be Cabbage Whites and Eastern Commas is a character-building experience. What there was to see I did get good looks at, however, thanks to some new gear. I’m not given to fanboying about optics, but the close focus (50 cm!) on my new Pentax Papilio 6.5x21s is just awesome, and ideal for butterflies. These binoculars work fairly well over my eyeglasses, and I’m tempted to use these inexpensive field glasses as my all-around birding optics.

Doyles River itself was just a trickle, so I passed up a side trip to the falls. The PATC-mapped short circuit took me 2:40. The altimeter in my watch pooped out (low battery), so I’ll have to use the PATC’s estimate of a 900-foot elevation change; my sore muscles today will confirm that.

Last Saturday’s field trips took us to two freshwater wetlands in southern P.G. County, one well-known among naturalists, the other decidedly off the beaten path.

We met M-NCPPC ranger Chris Garrett at Suitland Bog. Chris is an accomplished trip leader who knows his park and what’s important to see, how to move the group along, and when to just take a moment and look and listen.

The park lies in the watershed of Henson Creek, a small trib of the Potomac. It’s actively managed: one of Chris’s great challenges is preventing the bog (technically it’s a fen, as much of the water comes from seeps) from drying out under the pressure of encroaching maples and willows. And there is Microstegium at the doorstep.

Several of the orchids on the plant list printed in the park brochure are probably extirpated, but Chris was able to point out Green Wood Orchis (Platanthera clavellata). He also found for us Ten-Angled Pipewort (Eriocaulon decangulare), the tiny Spatulate-leaved Sundew (Drosera intermedia), Halberd-leaved Greenbrier (Smilax pseudochina), and Red Milkweed (Asclepias rubra). We also got good looks at Netted Chain Fern (Woodwardia areolata), this time in fruit—alas, my snapshots were not satisfactory.

On the slopes leading down to the bog (sorry, fen), a Common Wood-Nymph (Cercyonis pegala) was on the wing (a first for me), and Chris showed us a fine patch of Lycopodium, including patches with sporangia.

Chris and the class moved south to Cheltenham Wetlands Park, a 200-odd acre tract next door to a Homeland Security facility. The park is sometimes likened to a better-known park across the river as “Huntley Meadows Park without the people,” or the amenities, for that matter. There is no visitor center, parking is on the outside of a locked gate, and those fellows from DHS might give you the stink-eye. The budget for keeping the boardwalks in trim is also lacking.

But it’s a charming little wetland, all the same. Stories differ as to how the water showed up in the wetland to begin with. The property was once home to an array of radio antennas (like HMP) (you can see remnants of the supporting poles here and there) and was managed by the U.S. Navy. One story is that a brass hat ordered the low spots to be dredged to support bass fishing; another is that the access road to the radio antennas formed a dike that retained water from periodic floods of Piscataway Creek.

Bird life at late morning was stil jumping: I counted 18 species heard or seen. Swallowtails of various sorts were numerous, and the Eastern Kingbird we saw was likely snacking on them. Arrowwood Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum) was in fruit, and Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) flowers were starting to mature. The destination plant for this scrub-shrub swamp is Common Bladderwort, with its itty-bitty yellow flowers emerging from the water above a haze of fine brown roots below the surface.

We took a look at a freshwater swamp for our next wetlands field trip, co-led by Charles County staffer Katie Bradley. Battle Creek Cypress Swamp is known around the area as being one of the northernmost places where Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) can be found in large numbers. It’s suspected that the cypresses did well in this spot, rather than getting crowded out by shade-tolerant understory species, because farmers once grazed cattle here.

Much of the soggy spots were just that, with no standing or running water, but Battle Creek itself still showed some flow, as it made its way south to the Patuxent.

Katie also took us upland into a nice managed meadow along the access road (Grays Road) that I hadn’t seen on my previous visit.

Down in the bottomlands, we found Netted Chain Fern (Woodwardia areolata). I’m starting to get a handle on this one, and how it differs from Sensitive Fern. Both are lovers of boggy spots, and both have the non-fernlike wings along the rachis. This note from Flora of Virginia helps a lot:

When fruiting structures are not present, Woodwardia areolata is sometimes confused with Onocolea, but in W. areolata, the pinnae tend to be alternate (tending to be opposite in Onocolea) and acute or acuminate (vs. obtuse), with finely serrulate margins (vs. entire) (p. 156)

The fine serrations and the alternate pinnae are fairly clear in the above image. But I still need to be patient and spend more time looking for sori.

Our first wetlands class field trip went to the Prince George’s side of Jug Bay on the Patuxent River. Greg Kearns of the park staff ran us up the river in a powered pontoon boat; he described the changes, good and bad, that he’s seen in the tidal wetlands over this 30-year career.

The re-establishment of Annual Wild Rice (Zizania aquatica) is due a decade of hard work by Kearns and his team: planting, spraying invasive Phragmites, building fences to exclude non-migratory Canada Goose (Branta canadensis), and other management activities regarding the geese (some call ’em flying cows). And the work has paid off. At left, the yellow-green band of veg in the midground, between the Spatterdock (Nuphar sp.) in the foreground and the gray-green Phragmites in the background, is Wild Rice. At right, you can see some of it coming into flower. This plant is a congener of the wild rice we eat, Z. palustris, harvested from the upper Midwest and Canada.

After the boat trip, a handful of us wandered down to the observation tower. We were surprised to find several good examples of Baldcypress (Taxodium distichum), especially since the feature of next week’s trip to Battle Creek Cypress Swamp is this same tree. Here’s an example that appears to be doing quite well.

Oh, yeah, and the place is crazy full of Osprey (Pandion haliaetus).

I had a little time before my scheduled meeting at Patuxent Research Refuge/National Wildlife Visitor Center, up the B-W Parkway in the general vicinity of Laurel, and I needed some more field notebook work, so I took a quick loop along the Fire Road and Laurel Trails. The trails here are picture book walks in the woods, very friendly for school trips (of which I am sure there are many in season): duff and pine needles and pea gravel, a little wet in the low spots. And apparently more or less deer-free.

The plants here on the Coastal Plain reflect an acidic soil: some lingering Kalmia latifolia blooms, but mainly fruit; blueberries dominating the herbaceous and understory layers in many places.

The Goose Pond is a tranquil spot, at least looking in the opposite direction from the water control structure.

There’s always something new to see at Huntley Meadows Park. Today I visited with a group led by Jane Huff for my general biology class. I rarely spend much time on the boardwalk in June, so I don’t get to see Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) in fruit. Today I saw the buttons.

Water Pennywort (Hydrocotyle americana) is such a common emergent that I’ve never stopped to really look at it. This image is perhaps more atmospheric than diagnostic, but I like it.

Classmate Tom took one look at the watermarked plant that so bedeviled me last month (and for which I had no good photo) and said, “Here’s Sweet Cicely.” So we can put a name it, Osmorhiza claytonii.

We watched the usual noisy tussle between smaller birds and a Red-shouldered Hawk. But what I hadn’t seen before was an extended interaction between a male Red-winged Blackbird and a Great Egret that, according to the blackbird, was too much in his space. (This was down at the remnants of beaver dam just below the tower, the place that I remember for a tree that used to be there in which I saw one of my first Orchard Orioles.) The blackbird vocalized and flew at the egret, occasionally striking it. The egret seemed to shrug this off, moving a few strides away, but the blackbird persisted, continuing to harass. The blackbird was so insistent that he coaxed a croak out of the egret. Eventually the egret flew off down Barnyard Run. A few minutes later, we saw a second brief fight farther across the main pond—very difficult to say whether these were the same two birds.

Lots of Great Spangled Fritillaries (Speyeria cybele) flying and feeding on the Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) that is coming into bloom. We saw one of these butterflies puddling on the remains of some goose poop on the boardwalk.

The really interesting find was this jelly mushroom that we came across along the informal trail along Barnyard Run. It keys out to Auricularia auricula, and is apparently edible. An Asian species is called “Cloud Ears;” it is dried and used to flavor soups. Go figure.