In the Field – Page 25 – A Honey of an Anklet

Fort Totten

My first of two walks under the auspices of WalkingTown DC was a quick spin through Fort Totten led by Mary Pat Rowan, with an emphasis on the woody plants of this semi-preserved area. The geology of this high point in the landscape is somewhat unusual: it’s a gravel terrace perched on impermeable clay. You can get a bit of the feel for the geology in the image, where the clay and gravel are exposed by excavations that provided a powder magazine for this Civil War earthworks in defense of the capital. Unusual geology means unusual flora, with some dry conditions specialists in evidence, among them Amelanchier species (one of these days I will learn to recognize Serviceberry) and Blackjack Oak (Quercus marilandica). Chestnut Oak (Q. montana), that upper-elevation specialist, is also thriving. Mary Pat also noted that Pitch Pine (Pinus rigida) can be found in the park, but we didn’t have time to take a look.

Barreling off trail and kicking up occasional human-dropped litter, Mary Pat led us through a patch of heath community plants, including high and lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium sp.), huckleberries (Gaylussacia sp.), and Pink Azalea (Rhododendron periclymenoides).

Bristoe Station Battlefield Heritage Park

A meadow in early fall means a goldenrod clinic for the experienced, but I shied away from genus Solidago and concentrated on the easier plants. Charles Smith ably led a VNPS field trip to Bristoe Station Battlefield Heritage Park, which features more than 100 acres of upland that are being restored to meadow. (The park is so new that it doesn’t register on Yahoo! Maps.) A field of fescue aside, the place looks pretty good (especially compared to another old field that I have visited recently).

The country around Bristoe (or Bristow) Station, on the railway line that connects Manassas to the Virginia hinterlands to the southwest, was the site of Civil War battles in 1862 and 1863. The line is still in heavy use (we heard freights come through about once an hour), and Bristow is just beyond the Broad Run terminus of VRE commuter service. Some of us complained about noise from the general aviation airport nearby. No two ways about it, this park is wedged in close to the built environment of exurbia and its housing subdivisions. According to a trailside map, the park also lies in the headwaters of the Broad Run watershed.

Charles (who is part of Fairfax County’s Resource Management team), along with field trip participants who volunteer at Fairfax County’s Huntley Meadows Park, was a good source of peripheral resource management information and opinions. He calls the alien grass Arthraxon hispidus “the Microstegium of wet, open places.” Apparently the county champion Winged Sumac (Rhus copallinum) can be found in Huntley Meadows Park. Charles encouraged us to get a whiff of the maple syrup-scented Sweet Everlasting (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium); pointed out the cunning fruits of Seedbox (Ludwigia alternifolia); and found a loosestrife with the hard-to-spell name Cuphea petiolata, otherwise known as Blue Waxweed. Charles does birds, too, and he reports that Grasshopper Sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum) is uncommonly cooperative in this patch—worth a return trip.

Others in the group found several examples of a Ground Cherry in flower and fruit that we consensus ID’d as Smooth Ground Cherry. USDA gives the nomenclature as Physalis longifolia Nutt. var. subglabrata (Mack. & Bush) Cronquist. The ornamental plant Chinese Lantern is in the same genus.

No fruits, but a native Red Mulberry (Morus rubra) was doing well (the common White Mulberries [M. alba] you see everywhere were imported by colonists in a failed attempt to establish a silk trade). I believe I heard Charles say that the leaves on rubra are more regular, a statement borne out by the image at right. David Sibley’s book also points out the lenticels in young bark, which you can also see in the photo.

A couple of Monarch butterflies made an apperarance; a skipper or two—the weather remained cloudy and cool. While I was stroking the greasy top of Purple-top (Tridens flavus), we spotted a lettuce and a spurge, each with their own milky sap.

A lovely composite, no longer in the genus Eupatorium with the bonesets and Joe-Pye weeds, this is Blue Mistflower (Conoclinium coelestinum).

Bull Run Mountains loop

After our recent heavy rains, the woods were exploding with mushroom fruiting bodies on today’s field trip to the Bull Run Mountains, under the auspices of the Virginia Native Plant Society and the Prince William Wildflower Society, host to the VNPS’ annual meeting. I wish that I had had such conditions when I was working through David Farr’s mushroom class last year.

We hiked a state preserve property managed by the Bull Run Mountains Conservancy. The trailhead (within earshot of I-66) is on Beverley Mill Road, which parallels Virginia 55 through Thoroughfare Gap. Moving north, we crossed the railroad and moved into the area that was once the managed by the Chapman family. The family cemetery is compact, with most of the markers representing nineteenth-century passings, some of them quite premature.

At the ruins of Meadowland, the family home, late-blooming Wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia) (in the Aster family) was still going strong. Smartweeds around here were prevalent, and I made a note to bone up on my Polygonum knowledge.

Our group was quite large, and it was only after we split into smaller groups to make the climb to the ridgeline that things felt completely organized. There was a temptation to hang back with the fern and lycophyte specialist leader as we moved up the Fern Hollow Trail—the hollows of this mountain are jumping with lycopdodium and other spore plants—but I pressed on with the climbers.

The ascent is fairly gentle, rising about 850 feet in 2 miles or so to the High Point Overlook. (The return felt a little more crumbly.) Going up, we paused to ID Pitch Pine (Pinus rigida). But the destination pine for this trip is Table Mountain Pine (P. pungens), found at the High Point overlook. The overlook, accessible through the indulgence of private property owners, is just over the line in Fauquier County, by my map reading. Also near the summit, False Foxglove (Aureolaria spp.) was isn bright yellow flower.

Coming back down, parasitoids seemed especially easy to find. Both species of Monotropa (Indianpipe in the left image and Pinesap in the right)…

and a Broomrape family member, Beechdrops (Epifagus virginiana). This is a lovely natural area completely new to me, visited by not too many people, not far from D.C. (It’s just a few miles beyond the Gainesville split.) I will make it a point to return.

Great Falls grasslands

So the last place you would probably expect a workshop on grasses identification to take place would be Great Falls Park. It turns out, however, that the park harbors some specialized habitat—globally rare, according to trip leader Cris Fleming—that is especially hospitable to Poaceae and the other graminoids.

The Potomac River’s periodic floods, every twenty or so years, is the key to the grasses’ success. Right along the edge of Mather Gorge, large trees don’t get a chance to establish a closed canopy which would shade the grasses out.

The result is tiny patches of specialized plant communities that otherwise you’d expect to see in the tallgrass prairie of the Great Plains. Tucked into the crags and clinging to the extremely thin soil are species like Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), and various Panicum species, like Switchgrass. Members of some other plant families like it here, too, like the flashy blue Dense Blazing Star (Liatris spicata), the diminutive Whorled Milkweed (Asclepias verticillata), and Wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia).

It should come as no surprise that grasses are a challenging photographic subject, especially when the photographer and gear are of the point-and-shoot variety. But I did manage to snap this image of Wild Oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) in a slightly shadier spot.

Of the fescue tribe of the grass family, we looked at Elymus virginicus, Virginia Wild Rye (not related to the domesticated rye), with its aggresively long awns; Bottle-brush Grass (E. hystrix), looking like a herringbone; Purple-top (Tridens flavum), also known as Greasegrass: it feels more tacky than greasy. North of the visitor center, in the bed of the Potowmack Canal, we saw two Leersia species, including Rice Cutgrass. My old posts suggest that this native plant is a problem at Huntley Meadows Park, but we saw just a small patch here. It does resemble the violently aggressive Stilt-grass (Microstegium vimineum), but its leaf lacks the silvery pale midrib.

We also found some nice examples of non-grasses, a nice sedge (Cyperus strigosus) and a rush all in fruit (Juncus tenuis) ekeing out life on the towpath. Elsewhere, the Black Gums (Nyssa sylvatica) are starting to go red in the leaves. Black Vultures (Coragyps atratus) were kettling and generally hanging out with the more numerous Turkey Vultures.

Yosemite National Park and Mono Basin: 6

The first thing to know about visiting Bodie State Historic Park is to plan extra time, both because this busted gold mining town is much bigger than you would expect and because the drive in will take more time than you’ve planned for. At first, I planned on driving in on Cottonwood Canyon Road from CA 167, but a sign promised “very rough road” and the prospect of covering 10 miles in 30 minutes. I had abused my rental enough already, so I backtracked to U.S. 395 and CA 270.

The good news about CA 270 is that the Caltrans has an active repaving project for the state highway-numbered section of the road. This is also the bad news, because you will sit for a good period of time waiting for a pilot car to escort you through the one-lane work zone. The bad news is that, once you get out of the work zone, the pavement is very rough in multiple patches. The bad bad news is that CA 270 only designates the first ten miles of the road into Bodie: the last three miles lose the highway number and the pavement.

What strikes me about Bodie is that it comes from an era where land was cheap and sanitation was not. There is a lot of empty space between buildings (although the interpretive brochure, $2 at the entrance station and a bargain, says that only a small fraction of the town’s original buildings are standing). Nevertheless, I noticed that only the hydro plant and the firehouse are located close to Bodie Creek—good idea to give the freshwater supply plenty of room. Very few buildings are two stories, not even all of the hotels. However, the schoolhouse has two floors. And the buildings are not crowded together, beetling over one main street, like they would be in a Hollywood movie set.

There is a museum to tour, and when we look in the windows of some of the structures, we see some artifacts have been positioned to give us the sense that someone might still be living here. But the dusty roads and the whine of the high mountain (elevation 8,379 feet) wind in the wires are authentic. Since most of the structures are wood, and built all at about the same time (the town housed about 10,000 people in 1879), most of the structures are at the same state of crumble. There are some brick structures (like the post office in the left image, and the remains of the vault for the first bank). The sawmill (right image) is one of the more decrepit buildings.

The mill area (the gray-blue structures at the left of the image) is off-limits to casual touring, but I did see a guide leading small groups through it.

The interpretive brochure simply describes this as Dog-face George’s house. It’s on Green Street, on the way out of town up the ridge heading southeast. Too bad we don’t know more of George’s story, but at least his nickname and his house are remembered.

Bonus birding: a couple of looks at Sage Thrasher (Oreoscoptes montanus) on the drive out of town back to U.S. 395.

Yosemite National Park and Mono Basin: 5

My semi-rustic accommodations near the western short of Mono Lake (no phone, TV, A/C, internet) were pleasant enough, save for the regular noise of heavy truck traffic on U.S. 395, just a few meters from the cabin.

I started the morning on the north side of the lake, at the county park. Very pleasant: a clear sky; shirtsleeves rolled down; save for one other photographer, I had the place to myself. A scope would have been a helpful to get a better view of the phalaropes feeding, but it wasn’t essential. In late July, the birds are almost all out of breeding plumage, so I was using field marks like bill length to separate Wilson’s from Red-neckeds. The short boardwalk trail leads straight out to the lake, with no loop. Some up-close encounters with the tufa, described by someone as a petrified spring.

As compared to the interpretive signage on the federal property on the south side of the lake, the county is more explicit about the role of the City of Los Angeles in the depletion of Mono’s water. The lake itself is not the water source; it has no outlet and is too salty for drinking. (That Mad King Ludwig calcium carbonate geology didn’t happen overnight in the 20th century.) Rather, it is the diversion of water from the Owens River and elsewhere in the watershed that is causing the lake to dry up.

In case we needed reminding, the city still owns land and water rights here. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

Following a tip from the Westrichs’ book, I followed an unmarked section of Cemetery Road that became gravel, beyond the boneyard, to a place marked by a shack, where Yellow-headed Blackbirds once congregated. No more. But I did learn something useful: car birding in a hybrid is brilliant! I was rumbling along the gravel, slow enough that I was already in electric mode, when I saw a bird I wanted a better look at. I touched the brake, the car stopped—and everything went quiet. No idling noise, no vibration. Just quiet.

On the south side of the lake, on Forest Service land, the trail forms a loop and you can get right to the water, if you care to. (It feels a little oily, or like watery gelatine.) There are consequently a lot more people. On the plus side, the sun angle is much better for looking at the birds. One or two of the Red-necked Phalaropes bore some traces of breeding plumage. Along with the signature spinning strategy, the birds seem to herd the alkali flies up to the shoreline for easier snacking. No vertebrate life survives in the water, but along the with flies, the lake is home to an endemic brine shrimp, Artemia monica.

Undisturbed, the flies form thick clusters. But the shadow of a slow hand wave is enough to get them moving.

I left the lake, tried another birding stop that might have been great at publication time (1991), then paid a short visit to Panum Crater. The volcanoes here in the basin are dormant; it is estimated that Panum was active only 650 years ago. Shards of obsidian on the trail. I didn’t walk the entire loop of the crater rim: hot, dry, not too many other visitors, and I really couldn’t be sure that the sketchily-marked trail made the complete circuit. Ever so slowly, the veg is making a place for life in the volcano’s crater.

Yosemite National Park and Mono Basin: 4

Sunday was intended for driving and birding, but I did as much botanizing as I did birding, and that without a local field guide. I drove east over the mountains along the road to Tioga Pass, which was not cleared of snow and opened to traffic until June 18 this year. I used LoLo and Jim Westrich’s Birder’s Guide to Northern California and Jean Richmond’s Birding Northern California as guides.

At Hodgdon Meadow (4,900 feet), I heard a few difficult flycatchers but saw few birds. At the campground, smoke was still evident in the air from a managed burn a couple weeks previous. I saw a lot of this lupine, perhaps Lupinus grayi.

At Olmstead Point, I couldn’t even scare up a Clark’s Nutcracker. Tenaya Lake is beautiful, but wasn’t birdy when I visited mid-day.

At Tuolumne Meadows, the bird that surprised me was Spotted Sandpiper (Actitis macularia), working the banks of the river.

On a side trail from the meadow, I found this fuzzy congener of the lupine I saw at lower elevations. I believe this to be Lupinus breweri. It was doing a scrappy job of colonizing otherwise bare soil; pines were the only other veg in evidence.

A final stop at Dana Meadows (about 9,700 feet) yielded a distant look at a Cassin’s Finch (Carpodacus cassinii). I got a good look at the strong red crown contrasting with the rest of the head feathers.

I left the park at Tioga Pass, just shy of 10,000 feet, and dropped down into the Mono Basin via Lee Vining Canyon.

Yosemite National Park and Mono Basin: 3

One of the best ways to get around Yosemite National Park, I quickly figured out, is to hop one of the shuttle buses that work the valley. Shuttle to your trailhead, walk a circuit or a straight line, and get back to your car at the central parking area on another shuttle. This plan is not without pitfalls, however, as I learned.

Saturday afternoon, after climbing to Columbia Rock in the morning, my plan was to use the El Capitan shuttle to its stop at the bridge over the Merced, hike the western loop of the Valley Floor Trail, then catch the El Cap shuttle at the picnic area and return to my rental vehicle. Now the Valley shuttle (the green route) runs into the evening, serving the campgrounds, the lodge, and suchlike; but the El Cap shuttle (the burgundy route) only runs until 18:00. No problem, I was on the trail by 14:45, the loop was about 6 miles on mostly level ground (rated moderate by Ranger Mates only for its length), I should be back to catch the last shuttle easily.

As soon as I left the shuttle stop, I discovered a hard truth about hiking in the park: the park doesn’t believe in trail blazes, and it’s not too keen on lots of wayfinding signs. I missed the trail I wanted to follow and was immediately backtracking along the road. (I’d like to turn the PATC loose in this park.)

Confidential to the man of the couple who asked me for directions to Half Dome on this same road: in casual conversation with a stranger, to make a point about gender roles, it’s best to avoid references to the Jaycee Dugard abduction case.

I found the trail I was looking for and started moving. It turns out that the Valley Floor Trail is not a good choice for a sunny July afternoon. It touches the very busy roads at too many points, and is generally too full of people. What is nice about the trail is that it’s nearly flat and smooth—the trail is worn-out pavement in a few places.

I was still making good time, looking to make the turn at the Pohono Bridge at sometime after 4. In the section leading to the bridge, the trail crosses the southside road, fords some braided streams, then skims along the Merced. I crossed the road and promptly found myself off trail; maybe I was disconcerted by the huge idling bus I had to walk around at the road crossing. But since I could keep the river on my right and the road on my left, I figured a little bushwhacking wouldn’t kill me.

It was then that I came to the ford. Lots of late snowmelt means good waterfall action into July, and it also means that the ford was two to three feet of fast-moving water. At first, I wasn’t sure where I was; it took a consult with my compass and several looks at the map to realize that the teensy blue line on the map was this dangerous-looking pour of water.

One of my survival skills is having a reasonable assessment of what I can do. I was just not ready to make this crossing, not by myself (where were the crowds now?), so I started backtracking. With the bushwhacking and the pondering, I had lost a lot of time, and I didn’t see a way to continue the loop. I would have to return the way I came, along some well-traveled trail.

My other survival skill is stubbornness. I got back to the southside road, and realized that I could still make the loop and the 18:00 shuttle if I beat feet along the road to the Pohono Bridge.

I made the turn at the bridge and started the return along the north side of the valley. Have I mentioned how profligate the scenery is around here? There you are, walking along, then there’s a break in the canopy and WHOMMP! there’s El Capitan looking at you.

I got to the northside road… and no picnic area. So I crossed the road and continued east. Lovely meadows, but no picnic area. Well, the last mile is always the longest, right? Somewhere just shy of 18:00 I realized that I had misread trail and map again, and that I had overshot the picnic area. I calculated that I could turn around and make a westward dash for the picnic area and the last El Cap shuttle, or I could continue east to Camp 4 where I could catch a Valley shuttle at the westernmost point of its route. After hiking 6 miles (and a climb in the morning), I wasn’t ready to outrun a bus. So I headed for Camp 4, adding another 2 miles or so to the walk. Total time for the open-jaw walk: approx. 3:30.

A busman’s holiday: waiting for the bus to arrive.

I did pause long enough to look at what I keyed out as a female Black-headed Grosbeak (Pheuticus melanocephalus).

Back in Mariposa in the evening, many of the eateries roll the sidewalks up by 21:00, but I had a fine dinner at The Butterfly Cafe. This place can even make a house salad interesting.

Yosemite National Park and Mono Basin: 2

Saturday was the day set aside for some serious walking and climbing, and I made good on that plan. I followed, after a fashion, two moderate hikes scouted by Ranger Vickie Mates.

But first I made the drive up Merced Canyon from Mariposa to the park entrance, following CA 140 along the south side of the canyon. The sight of the abandoned bed of a one-lane road running along the north side of the canyon is somewhat disconcerting. Sections of the old road are crumbling and overgrown after perhaps a mere half-century’s disuse.

However, not completely disused: the road jumps to the north side of the canyon (via a pair of temporary truss bridges) to get around a quite impressive rock slide. Between the signalized waits to traverse this section of the canyon and Monday’s trip up and down CA 270, I realized that driving through a damaged canyon is California’s answer to the Outer Banks’ wait for the impromptu ferry boat that crosses a new hurricane-opened inlet.

But back to the hiking. From the main parking area south of the visitor center, I took the “El Cap” shuttle bus to Camp 4 and the head of the trail that climbs to Upper Yosemite Falls. Following Ranger Mates’ advice, I climbed 1000 feet to some very nice vistas of the falls at Columbia Rock, then pushed on to one more look about a hundred feet higher. But I knew I would not have the juice to make it to the top. Lots of company on this trail: I heard a lot of German spoken. On the return descent, the slippery sand worn from the granite steps made me glad I’d brought my stick. I spotted a few White-Throated Swifts (Aeronautes saxatalis) in the valley. 3:30 up and down.

Along this trail and elsewhere I found examples of paintbrush (Castilleja sp.), a hemiparasite of plant roots now placed in the broomrape family. The green leaves shading to red at the distal end should have been a clue that I was not dealing with a conventional wildflower.

These rather tame squirrels in the park are an unexpected ID mystery. The pale “shrug” and non-bushy tail don’t match any of the candidate species I see in the field guides, but I suspect I’m dealing with nothing more exotic than a Western Gray Squirrel (Sciurus griseus).

Yosemite National Park and Mono Basin: 1

After a midday drive from Sacramento, I put in a 2-hour round trip climb to Sentinel Dome summit, using scouting reports like this one from Jason and Katie Loomis. I had originally planned the complete loop around the dome, with the side trip to Taft Point, but I got started later than I planned and I didn’t want to force myself in unfamiliar country at elevation. From the parking area on Glacier Point Road, it’s but a 400 foot ascent.

The nearly bare summit (8122 feet [2476 m]) nevertheless supports quite a bit of life — several wildflowers, including Mountain Pride (Penstemon newberryi); a succulent shrub that provides cover for the rather tame ground squirrels; an unidentified butterfly having a bask; and a couple of Common Ravens (Corvus corax).

A handful of people on the trail and at the top, like me, enjoying the extravagant views.

Frederick City Watershed

Our wrapup field trip took us to the Frederick City Watershed Cooperative WMA (part of the municipal forest property), on Catoctin Mountain between the national park and Gambrill State Park. We were cleared for netting in this area, and fortunately it’s not deer season, so we got good up-close looks at three skippers, Little Glassywing (Pompeius verna), Northern Cloudywing (Thorybes pylades), and Tawny-edged Skipper (Polites themistocles), as well as a Summer Azure (Celastrina ladon neglecta). I am still struggling with IDs of Papilio swallowtails, but Pat called Spicebush and Pipevine for the butterflies we brought in.

The destination butterfly for this area, however, is Edwards’ Hairstreak (Lycaena phlaeas), which is dependent on scrub oak and barrens habitat. Starting from a parking area on Gambrill Park Road north of Five Forks, Pat led us to a heathy patch (Vaccinium in fruit) known to be a hotspot. We were extremely fortunate to find several individuals, many of them ventrally basking on the oak foliage (Quercus ilicifolia). My field trip organization skills let me down however, so I was without means for good photographic documentation. The butterflies didn’t seem to mind.

Montgomery County butterflies

Our first stop on today’s field trip, part of Pat Durkin’s class on butterflies and their conservation, was to Black Hill Regional Park and a captive breeding facility for Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton). This relative of the Pearl Crescent is dependent on wet conditions and its host plant of Turtlehead (Chelone glabra); in Maryland, it’s in decline but has earned special attention because its black and gold colors recall Lord Baltimore’s livery. It overwinters as larvae, wrapped in a self-spun web of silk. Adults from the first breeding season in this modest facility (a pair of mesh-walled pup tents) have already flown, but they have left a promising egg mass on this Turtlehead leaf.

We then moved on to the Native Grassland Conservancy property, 23 acres leased from Seneca Creek State Park. Randy Pheobus showed us the work that the conservancy is doing, attempting to reclaim this old field, overrun with some nasty invasives like Johnsongrass and Canada Thistle. Randy is passionate and very persuasive about the need to protect grassland and meadow habitat in the mid-Atlantic. While forests and wetlands warrant legal protections and mitigation, grasslands are in a “blindspot” and get short shrift, according to Randy.

After three years of work, he and other volunteers have established four tiny beachheads of native grassland plants, including the one you see here. Randy’s team has transplanted Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), a grass, and Viola sagittata, a heliophilic violet. Not everything you see in the plot is native, but there are about 50 native species represented. As Randy might say, you have to pick your battles. The plastic pot holds rotting Star of Bethlehem, which apparently deters the deer population. Elsewhere on the property, a native thistle, Cirsium discolor, is gaining ground. Randy describes thistles as the keystone of any project managed for pollinators.

As interesting as the botany was, we were there to look at butterflies. The class found an even dozen species at this stop, including a fine Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) and a couple of skippers that I hadn’t met, and I added several names to my extremely short twitcher’s list. We agreed that netting a butterfly and transferring it to an observation jar is trickier than it looks.

On the way back to the cars we left at the park, we made a quick stop at a garden planted for Monarchs; most of the planting has gone to Dogbane (Apocynum sp.) and were rewarded with great looks at a Banded Hairstreak (Satyrium calanus).

Mixed

M.K. forwarded a link to Bill Higgins’s photos from Huntley Meadows Park of a mixed Wood Duck/Hooded Merganser brood. This year we have seen more boxes than usual with two species’ worth of eggs.

At the park: 44

We did our last full check of all the nest boxes on Sunday. Three more boxes hatched out; one box with only two eggs was apparently predated. We have two boxes with eggs remaining that M.K. will check as she is checking warbler boxes.

Val Kitchens and others have reported sightings of Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) in the park, but we were not so fortunate to spot the bird. As a hemi-marsh breeder, it’s a bird of special interest to park management.

M.K. showed us photos of the two snakehead fish that Dave Lawlor and staff took from the waters around box #13.

Up at the north end of the wetland, where we find all the trash that washes down from the subdivisions, the Lizard’s Tail (Saururus cernuus) was waist-high, making trash-picking a non-project. Would that the damselfly in this image had busied itself with the mosquitoes that were chomping on me.

At this same (very wet) location, I snapped a couple images of this purple-pink blooming milkweed, which I had identified previously as Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata). But take a look at the leaves, with the veins forming an almost right angle with the midrib. Newcomb keys this plant out as either Purple Milkweed (A. purpurascens) or Red Milkweed (A. rubra).

Furthermore, over by the observation tower, in the drier flat that is managed for meadow, milkweeds were in fuller bloom.

I need to go back and take a closer look at the underside of the leaves and the flowers. Milkweed flowers consists of a corona of five erect “hoods,” with a curved horn jutting from each hood. The size and configuration of hoods and horns is an ID key.

The species checklist prepared by the friends organization says that A. purpurascens is found in the park. Newcomb describes the habitat for A. purpurascens as “dry fields and thickets,” which is a better match for the meadow by the tower. Newcomb locates A. rubra in “wet pinelands and bogs,” which more closely describes the conditions at the north end of the wetland.

Sugarloaf wildflowers

After a misty start, the weather proved especially cooperative for our final field trip for spring wildflower ID. Would that my point and shoot had done the same. I made suitable images neither of a darling yellow flower of the amaryllis or lily families, Yellow Stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta), nor of the delicate Canada Mayflower (Maianthemum canadense), another lily.

Along Mt. Ephraim Road, where it crosses Bear Branch, to the west of the Sugarloaf Mountain summit, we compared the wiry stem of Indian Cucumber Root (Medeola virginiana) (yet another lily) to the fleshy stem of the pogonias, in this case Large Whorled Pogonia (Isotria verticillata) (an orchis family member). We also found some lingering fruits of Partidgeberry (Mitchella repens) along with this year’s tiny red flower buds in pairs. Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara), looking like a dandelion as the flower is opening, is easy to distinguish from its fellow Composite when you see the somewhat hoof-shaped leaf.

The bottomland along the stream turned out to be a bonanza for non-spermatophytes, with at least five ferns in evidence. These are early fronds of Sensitive Fern (Onoclea sensibilis), so named because it dies back after the first frost.

And as an added bonus, a completely different division of the vascular plants: Equisetophyta, the horsetails. This drift of plants, per one general guide, is Field Horsetail (Equisetum arvense).

We then took a quick drive and climb to the summit, finding hawkweed along the roadside and blueberries as we mounted the stairs. Up top, there are a few tiny patches of Pink Lady’s Slipper (Cypripedium acaule)—I think I prefer Moccasin Flower for its common name. Also some nonreproducing American Chestnut trees (Castanea dentata). We went in search of Checkerberry but only found a group of five-plus Mourning Cloak butterflies (Nymphalis antiopa).

Also scratching out a living on the summit, along with the Table Mountain Pine, is the leather-leaved Blackjack Oak (Quercus marilandica).