Category: In the Field

My third trip to Ellanor C. Lawrence Park, yet earlier in the day this time. It’s quite warm for October, and I heard Common Katydids in the early morning. White-Throated Sparrows are making their presence known. The Japanese Stilt-grass is starting to die back.

The park has provided some unexpected herps. This is the first Rough Green Snake (Opheodrys aestivus) that I’ve ever seen and identified. I nearly stepped on it, as it was lying across the trail and looked like a strappy leaf from a house plant, not like an animal at all. You can’t see the impossibly skinny tail in this image, but trust me, there’s another ten inches of snake out of frame.

Margaret Chatham led a grasses walk through the managed meadow at Riverbend Park on Sunday, a new place for me. This patch of twelve acres is upland, rather than down by the river where we go looking for bluebells, and it’s regularly mowed in strips. Access is from Jeffrey Road and the nature center, rather than the vistor center farther downstream, where the boat rentals happen.

Nimblewill (Muhlenbergia schreberi) was a new grass for me. The culms are a nice ruby red at this time of the year.

We looked at woody plants and forbs, too. I got a pointer on distinguishing a young catalpa tree from an invasive Paulownia. Look for the whorl of three or more leaves at the stem, as you see in this image. The Asian invader has only a pair of opposite leaves. Similarly, the only two Verbesina wingstems that we see here in the mid-Atlantic can be separated by their branching pattern.

Your botany WOTD is endozoochory, that is, seed dispersal that depends on passing through the gut of animals. Habitat managers found out too late, to their dismay, that Rosa multiflora can be invasive when aided by birds’ digestive tracts.

One of the learning objectives of this class project is to observe changes in the forest over the course of a season. I stumbled upon an unexpected case of before-and-after with this log, seen in two images. The image at the left was made on 27 September; the one on the right today. The bright yellow, striped fruiting body, just little blobs on the log in September, is the mushroom Laetiporus sulphureus. It’s an edible polypore known by various common names, including Sulphur Shelf and Chicken of the Woods.

Our first class field trip, examining forest ecosystems of the mid-Atlantic, visited three spots in Shenandoah National Park. Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) (left) was in fruit in Buck Hollow, on the flank of the Blue Ridge. And up top, we found Mountain Holly (Ilex montana) (right) likewise offering red yummies; the holly’s fruits have four seeds each.

Katydids were singing at mid-day, clearly understanding that “last call” was imminent. On the Stony Man Nature Trail (which I last walked in May), Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) was blooming like crazy. We also made the acquaintance of Poke Milkweed (Asclepias exaltata), a milkweed of the woods, and Mountain Maple (Acer spicata), which looks like Striped Maple without the stripy bark.

I scooped up a American Carrion Beetle (Necrophila americana) for everyone to admire. And Stephanie identified a trio of Table Mountain Pine trees (Pinus pungens) across Skyline Drive from the Stony Man Overlook parking area. I’d like to make a map of everywhere P. pungens can be found in the Park.

How do you keep a wildflower meadow as a meadow? Well, it’s a matter of controlling successional plants. There’s a nice patch of meadow at Huntley Meadows Park, accessible by the new access road that extends from the hike-bike trail. (There’s even a vernal pool that has formed in a new low spot next to the built-up road.) Park management chose not to use fire or a bush hog to keep down the shrubby trees that want to grow into this meadow (which would ultimately reclaim it for forest). We love Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) and it’s a native, but the trees will eventually shade out the grasses and flowers; we’re not so wild about the invasive Autumn Olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) that is also growing here. Both of them were our targets.

Instead, the Park sent in the volunteers, equipped with limb loppers and pruning saws. I’ve seen dense stands of Sweetgum before, but I didn’t realize that many of those trees were sprouts from a common stem. In the photo, by the pruning saw, you can see three small stems that we clipped off, all growing from a common root, as well as the three-inch trunk that I cut through.

I also helped Karla and Gwen pull collect Autumn Olive fruits, lest they lead to germination. The berries are not bad, kinda tart like cranberries. Just resist the temptation to spit out the seeds.

For my Labor Day hike, I pushed a little longer and harder than I have done of late. My notebooks say that the last time I did the long circuit loop hike to South River Falls in Shenandoah NP was in 1999, back when my legs were fresher. It was a muggy day, but almost all of the walking was under the canopy, so the heat wasn’t oppressive. It’s post-breeding dispersal time, so almost all of the birds I detected were heard-only (Common Ravens croaking). I did see a few butterflies: some fritillaries, a few swallowtails.

The destination for this hike is the falls, and the falls (dropping 83 feet, including the upper and lower cascades) are worth the hike down and the long climb back to the car. I was astonished that, on a holiday weekend, I had the falls all to myself for a good ten minutes.

I also stopped at the South River cemetery, located off the Pocosin Trail near the Park boundary. Unfortunately for the Taylors and Meadowses resting there, the place is not being maintained.

The PATC rates the 10-mile long circuit as Moderate, and that’s a fair assessment, save for the long 950-foot climb back from the bottom of the falls to the parking areas. There’s also a 600-foot gradual climb of Bareface Mountain in this circuit that sneaks up on you. I made the circuit in 6:45, not much more than PATC’s par of 5:45 when you consider that I missed a turn and came back on the fire road rather than the dedicated trail. Trail or fire road, both are generously sized: lots of room for walkers who need to overtake or take a breather.

At the beginning of this loop, I came across a couple of long-distance hikers on the AT, and one of them gave me a trail name. I’m not sure whether I’m going to own up to it.

I had a couple of hours between events in Bloomsburg to take a ramble through Nescopeck State Park. The traces of earlier uses of this land are easy to read: the Wood Frog Way Loop trail is almost rectilinear. There were many more annoying dipterans than charismatic lepidopterans to be found on this cloudy Saturday morning. But hunting in the park has apparently kept the deer population in check, and hence the understory looks to be in good shape. And I found a couple patches of healthy-looking Eastern Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis), hopefully adelgid-free.

To break in a new pair of boots, I took an easy loop hike on the blue blazes around the battlefield of First Bull Run. The breezes were strong, and it was midday, but there were a few butterflies flying. I turned up something I didn’t remember from last year—Common Wood Nymph (Cercyonis pegala)—as well as something that turned out to be, upon checking my photos later, an animal I’ve never put on my list before, Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor). I think I’ve probably seen this guy before, but I’ve been put off by one of the photos of the dorsal side in Glassberg’s book. The ID key, it seems, is actually the single row of orange spots on the ventral side of the hindwing.

The bridge over Bull Run was once a prized strategic objective. Now, not even the nesting swallows are interested in it; they prefer the U.S. 29 bridge just downstream.

The trail gets a lot of noise from the roads and a winery just across the run, but it crosses through a lot of woods and can be quite pleasant.

The Carter family cemetery is completely enclosed by a stone wall built from the ruins of Pittsylvania, the manor house. The graves within are not individually marked. The last interment was done in 1903.

One of the simpler assignments for my current class in freshwater ecosystems was to visit the falls of the Northwest Branch (and have a picture taken to prove it).

This reach of the river is wild and urbanized at the same time. The trail is a short stumble down from a parking lot on Colesville Road. This is the site of Burnt Mills (ooh, the Internet Archive has an interesting book from 1931 about the history of the flour mill that was here). The riverborne trash is hard to overlook, and especially around the parking lot, the non-native invasive plants are pretty aggressive. Nevertheless, I found a few bits of Rattlesnake Weed (Hieracium venosum) growing around the rocks. Leta and I scrambled for a couple hundred yards downstream before turning back. I showed her an Acadian Flycatcher making sallies to a pool.

On the other side of Colesville Road, the river is held back by a dam and spillway. On this flat bit of trail, we found two Five-lined Skinks (Eumeces fasciatus): a juvenile with the familiar blue tail and a much-larger adult male with indistinguishable lines, orange-red in the head, and a truncated tail.

Leta chatted with one of the fishermen, who said that sometimes he took bream from the river. I think that we would know these as sunfish.

Today’s report for nesting activity, abridged and annotated:

A much greener park than 5 weeks ago, and most of our boxes have hatched! We have 8 (at least partially) successful nests, and one failed drop/dump nest in box #4. Box #13 was in the process of hatching when we got there; the Wood Duck hen flushed and showed a somewhat unexpected distraction display. We closed up the box quickly and backed off; we will get a shell count next time. Box #84 may also be in the process of hatching. Box #60, hatched out, at right.

In the vicinity of box #62, we had unaided eye views of a male Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotoria citrea), vocalizing “sweet-sweet” and checking out some natural holes in a snag. Of course, this the spot where we’d maintained warbler boxes for a few years–until this season.

We’ll have another work day in June, to count #13 and #84 and two more boxes that haven’t yet hatched. Box #62, still unhatched, at left.

Water gauge reading: 1.64

This beaver-cropped Sweetgum tree reminds me of Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk. A lot.

Our field trip for Jai Cole’s Freshwater Ecosystems class visited the Left Fork of the Paint Branch, on the site of the former Maydale Nature Center. The site is part of the Upper Paint Branch Special Protection Area, and the stream was the target of recently completed restoration work. We focused on the restoration work, and also performed a classroom exercise-level habitat assessment.

The centerpiece of the restoration is this 100-meter reach. You’re looking upstream and roughly northwest, standing on a bridge that provides access to the area. Out of frame to the right is a small parking lot. The point of the project was to replace a series of notched logs that channelled the stream as it drops from a weir (the flat water just visible in the background) (which maintains water supply for a pair of ponds on the property) and flows under the bridge; the problem with the logs was they they weren’t designed to allow fish passage. (Brown Trout is a naturalized breeder in the watershed.) The project replaced the logs with a series of arcing rock structures (called “cross-veins” in the local engineering parlance), each with a gentler drop and a plunge pool downstream. The pools give fish swimming upstream enough elbow room to get up speed to jump and surmount the rock barrier. Notice how the top of each arc of stones drops a few inches at the center: that’s where we want the most water to flow. A vertical plane through a watercourse passes through the point of maximum flow and the deepest part of the channel, which is called the thalweg, and in this case we want the thalweg to remain where it is.

From elsewhere on the stream, here’s a closeup (albeit with a lot of glare) of an arced cross-vein on the right and a straight-line weir on the left. Water flow is right to left, and the weir maintains the pool downstream of the cross-vein. Again, notice that, at this level of flow, the stones of the cross-vein near each bank are high and dry, and the stones in the center have the most flow over them.

Stephanie Mason led another nature hike yesterday, this time at an elevation considerably higher than three weeks ago. We covered about 5 miles along the Appalachian Trail and side trails, from Stony Man to Jewel Hollow.

We got some nice looks at high-elevation tree specialists for our region, like Balsam Fir (Abies balsamea), Red Spruce (Picea rubens), and the glossy-barked Yellow Birch (Betula alleghaniensis). Perhaps owing to the higher elevations around Stony Man (4011 feet), the Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees in this patch look pretty healthy and untouched by the adelgids.

Closer to the ground, spring ephemerals were abundant—Wild Pink, Moss Phlox, cinquefoil, bluets, many violets, Wood Anemone, waterleaf, Star Chickweed. I picked up one butterfly for my list, Falcate Orangetip (Anthocharis midea). Among the birds, the best was a bird from my “renewal” list of lifers that I haven’t seen in a long time: Veery (Catharus fuscescens). Good, multiple looks at Chestnut-sided Warbler (and we could point them out to a party of passing hikers) and American Redstart.

We climbed about 300 feet, then dropped down and ended about 300 feet below our starting point. We hit Stony Man early enough in the day (before noon) that the traffic was not too bad.