Category: In the Field

Frogging by ear tips, derived from yesterday’s walk to Calvert Cliffs on the Western Shore of Chesapeake Bay with Stephanie Mason: Gray Tree Frog (Hyla versicolor and H. chrysoscelis) sounds something like the ratchet on a retractable dog leash, while the irregular clicking sound of Cricket Frog (Acris sp.) resembles those annoying magnetic balls that my colleague Dylan likes to play with.

Once again, we saw elvers shimmying their way up Grays Creek. Eels (the young are elvers) are catadromous, that is they migrate downstream from fresh to salt water to breed then die, unlike the better known anadromous migrants (like salmon) that swim upstream to freshwater spawning grounds.

Also in the watercourse, we saw many Water Boatmen (Corixidae) sculling about.

Stephanie calls the 5-inch-long Fence Lizard (Sceloporus undulatus) our local iguana, since it is in the same superfamily as the big guys of the southwest.

Trees were late leafing out (this is one of my favorite local species, Carpinus caroliniana, just opening up), so the birding was good. We heard or saw nearly three dozen species, and found two nests being built by Blue-gray Gnatcatchers (Polioptila caeruluea). The gnatcatchers showed some variety in vocalizations; one colloquy between two birds sounded like a couple of mockingbirds after too much espresso. My good bird was a fairly common species that I just don’t see very often, Yellow-throated Warbler (Dendroica dominica).

Margaret Chatham led a wildflower walk at the Nature Conservancy’s Fraser Preserve for VNPS. Spring Beauty was plenteous, but (as you would expect, given the everlasting winter we had) many bloomers were weeks behind schedule. Margaret showed us one example of Harbinger-of-Spring (Erigenia bulbosa) (very difficult to image properly); Purple Cress (Cardamine douglassii) was in various states of opening into flower; some Trout Lilies (Erythronium americanum) in a sheltered wet spot were in flower. But the Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) and Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) really hadn’t gotten started yet.

Down along the pipeline easement, the Poison Hemlock was nothing but basal leaves, nothing at all like the towering plant I saw just 49 weeks ago.

We found some early flying Spring Azure and Mourning Cloak butterflies. I was happy because we found three single Bloodroot blooms (Sanguinaria canadensis), widely scattered—this has been sort of a nemesis plant for me.

Reports from the nest box team for the past two Sundays:

We have evidence of roosting in 7 of the boxes, but at this point we have nests in only 2. Box #3 is incubating, so we can skip checking that one next week. With Steve’s help, we replaced box #6 this afternoon.

Notable birds for 9 March: Northern Pintail, Northern Shoveler, Gadwall, Green-winged Teal, Ring-necked Duck, Bufflehead, American Coot

We found a dead Barred Owl along Barnyard Run; we conveyed the specimen to park staff.

Notable birds for 16 March: Northern Pintail, Northern Shoveler, Gadwall, Green-winged Teal, Ring-necked Duck, Bufflehead, Hooded Merganser, Wood Duck, Eastern Bluebird, Eastern Phoebe, Tree Swallow (afternoon)

Water gauge readings: 1.86 (9 March), 1.50 (16 March)

Much of the snow has melted and packed down, but much remains. The blacktop trail and stream are clear, but much of Lake Audubon is iced over. Hence my most numerous bird was not the $100 Jeopardy! answer, Canada Goose, but rather Red-winged Blackbird. I had reached the footbridge and was ready to turn around when one of the rather reliable Red-shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus) of these woods made an appearance.

Best bird of the day was a Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) watering in a puddle of meltwater. A respectable 22+ species count. Bonus mammal: a Red Fox trotting across the frozen surface of the lake.

Saturday, Paula DePriest led a workshop of mostly frozen participants to Carderock on the Maryland side of the river. Our subject: rock and tree lichens (the soil lichens being inaccessible due to snow cover). Soil, rock, or bark is only the substrate (although certain species do have a preference); the lichen gets no nourishment from it. In all cases, sugars are generated by algae held in the body (thallus) of the lichen, which comprises a fungus. Depending on your point of view, the alga is a captive of the fungus or (Dr. DePriest’s preference) is domesticated by the fungus.

Rocks in this area often are commonly home to a Mid-Atlantic specialty, Flavoparmelia baltimorensis. It’s the pale yellow-green (yellow to a lichenologist) lichen at the lower left of this badly-focused image, along with Lepraria sp. at the right and Pertusaria sp. at the left.

The olive-ish color and black specks of Porpidia sp. are fairly easy to learn. This individual is about 4cm across, as you can see from the scale card.

The relatively bright yellow of Candelariella sp. is also easy to find. This crustose lichen goes by the common name of Egg Yolk Lichen.

This Punctelia rudecta, a foliose lichen, was found on bark. The tiny punctuations in the lichen’s thallus, and the dark isidia surrounding them, don’t read in this image.

The good news is that there are about three dozen taxa of lichens of interest in the D.C. area. You can write a key (as Dr. DePriest has) to all of them that takes up only two pages. The bad news is that you need at least a hand lens to apply the key.

Construction is complete for the wetlands restoration project at Huntley Meadows Park! Some additional planting and trail work remains, but the period of monitoring and maintaining has begun.

Park manager Kevin Munroe led a special-access “backstage” mini-tour of the dam and water control structure for a group of volunteer staff on Saturday. Working backwards, as it were, this is a view of the outflow into Barnyard Run. As you can see, everything is still rather raw and artificial looking. The sine wave-like curves of this stream haven’t yet been naturalized to a messier state. Kevin says that the park will take an “adaptive management” approach to the project. If the beavers drag one log across this watercourse (beavers abhor moving water), it won’t necessarily be removed.

The water control structure itself is disguised as an observation platform, via the addition of the protective railing. At left, a view upstream, looking at the main wetland. At right, water flows right to left through the baffles and chambers of the structure, through a buried concrete culvert, into the outflow.

Manholes for easy (depending on what you think “easy” means) access to the interior of the structure, for cleaning out debris.

The observation platform itself, accessible from the South Kings Highway side of the park via the hike-bike trail and a new stone dust trail, is obscured from view from the main observation tower and boardwalk by an artificial knoll. Even though it’s possible to access the dam and water control structure from the boardwalk side of the park, this is discouraged by management, for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. But making the platform and tower mutually invisible makes the crossing less tempting.

The working part of the dam is an interlocking wall of vinyl sheet pilings. All you can see of the wall is the plastic strip that runs along the top, the straight white line in this image. From an engineering and hydrology standpoint, the earthen berm enclosing the dam on both sides is unnecessary: it’s purely for naturalization. (Cf. the unsheathed impoundment walls that you see on many National Wildlife Refuges.) The ground has been planted with native grasses and vines, and the hope is that by summer the dam and its berm will be covered with chest-high grass and access-dissuading, thorny greenbrier and raspberry canes. Something to check back on in a few months.

Something else to look for in the future: A few trees have been caged in metal fabric to prevent beavers from taking them down—there’s a Red Maple right next to the “phoebe bridge.” Soon, you will see more trees thus caged, but these are trees that park staff understand will be killed by inundation as water from the project finds its new level. These will become snags, standing dead trees that serve as habitat for all sorts of organisms, and are thus valued by foresters.

There’s a great photoset of work-in-progress images curated by the Park Authority. In particular, you can see the interlocking sheets that make up the dam, before they were covered in dirt.

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.