Wild Wednesday ~ Little Visitor

A few of weeks ago, as a nor'easter prepared to blow through, I dragged all our houseplants inside. We'd already had a couple of frosts, and, though the plants were mostly protected by the exhuberant growth of a kiwi vine that's taken over our deck in a Little Shop of Horrors-esque fashion, they were starting to glare at me in an accusatory fashion for neglecting them.

The next day, I heard a strange and surprising sound coming from the sunroom, where the plants live: Peep-peep-peep-peep.

I knew that spring peepers occassionally call during the waning days of fall, lamenting, I assume, the onset of winter. I did not know that they occassionally take up residence in houseplants and thereby move into the homes of unsuspecting humans.

I scurried to the sunroom, but the peeping had stopped by the time I got there, and with a couple dozen plants, all overgrown from a summer outdoors, there was no way I was going to find a frog the size of my thumbnail. And so it went over the next week: Peep-peep-peep-peep. Scurry. Silence. I tried playing a peeper chorus from my frog songs CD. I tried combing out dead leaves from the plants and pruning back excessive vegetation. I tried misting them with water to imitate a light rain. No luck.

Finally, after about a week, I made it to the sunroom in time to narrow the call down to the southeast corner. I took the plants from that corner and spread them out, and thus triangulated my way to the call the next time I heard it, finding the little scamp hiding under the succulent leaf of an aloe vera plant. At this point it was late in the day and getting a little chilly out, and I decided to wait until the warmest part of the following day to escort the stowaway outside. Unfortunately, when I went to release him, I found he had absconded to another plant and again I couldn't find him.

I was a little worried that the frog was getting dehydrated, so I lightly watered the plants and waited for the giveaway peep-peep. But it came less frequently and for shorter intervals than it had before. Had I squandered its last chance for survival? Finally, one day nearly a week after I first found the frog, I was able to narrow the call down to a small area of the room and found the peeper hiding between the inner and outer pot of another aloe vera plant.

It was a cold, damp day, but I wasn't taking any chances with the frog relocating itself again, so I took it outside, across the driveway, released it among the damp leaves that it's so well-camouflaged with, and wished it well in its upcoming hibernation and return next spring.

Wild Wednesday ~ Tiny Things

Yesterday, when walking in the woods with my kids, I came across something I've been hoping to see for years: green stain fungus.

Okay, actually I've seen the fungus, Chlorociboria spp., many times, in the form of chunks of wood stained a lovely dark teal. But I haven't seen the fruiting bodies, which are known as green elf cups. And then there they were on this little chunk of wood near the river.


I didn't have my camera or even my phone with me, so I brought the wood home and left it outside under a tree overnight. After a solid soaking from an all-night rainstorm, the fruiting bodies doubled in size, from pin head to peppercorn. I imagine they'll keep growing until they develop the classic goblet shape that gives the species its common name.



In other tiny fruiting body news, today I found on our driveway this dead aspen branch that came down in the storm.

Closer inspection revealed that it was colonized with all kinds of life. Each of these orange blobs of jelly fungus was about the size of a currant. I think they might be very tiny specimens of witches butter, Tremella mesenterica, another type of fungal fruiting body. 

And all over the branch grew this bright golden lichens, which is also fruiting, and I think may be Candelaria fibrosa.



Those round disk thingies are the apothecia, or fruiting bodies. Everyone's getting in on the fruiting act it seems.



We've also had a very tiny visitor to our sunroom this week, who I was going to release outside when it got warm today, but the darn thing went and hid on me. Hopefully I'll find him in time for the next edition of Wild Wednesday.

Wild Wednesday ~ Playing With Words in Nature

Today I got to spend a lovely couple of hours outdoors with a group of high school creative writing students. We practiced using all of our senses to describe a place, wrote a praise poem about a small natural object we collected, and then we took a walk along a poetry trail created by our wonderfully talented and energetic hostess, who happens to be the students' teacher. She's made beautifully decorated pieces of wood painted with lines from the Mary Oliver poem "Sleeping in the Forest" were mounted to trees along our way, and I gave the students the assignment of choosing a line that spoke to them and using it as a jumping-off point for free writing.



The line that struck me was "pockets full of lichens and seeds" and went a little fanciful with my free write:

Autumn trips across the land,
her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
She casts acorns in a game of dice—
snake eyes mean winter's on its way.
Where her toes touch down,
mushrooms spring up—pink, gold, purple, cinnabar—
peeking through their coverlet of leaves.
The mosses, though—sphagnum, cushion, club—
resist her touch, glowing emerald green
in the slanting sun.
And the tiny white pine, its wiry needles
gray-green but defiant.

That's all I had time for before we had to round the students up and herd them back to school.

Wild Wednesday ~ Warblers

On Wednesday I go outside for a quick walk before I have to leave to pick the twins up from cross-country practice, and the trees at the top of the driveway are all aflutter and atwitter. I run back inside, grab my binoculars, and follow the flock into the woods across the driveway. I'm in a cloud of warblers. They barely notice me as they hop from tree to branch to leaf, fattening up for their long journey ahead. I watch one pull a fat green caterpillar off of a leaf and flutter to a nearby branch to feast.

Fall warblers are notoriously hard to identify. The young haven't yet feathered out in their adult plumage and the parents have shed their breeding regalia. I recognize some as yellow-rumped warblers, but the others remain a mystery, and far too soon I need to leave. By the time I get home, more than an hour later, the birds have moved on, and the next day the woods are silent, too.

The next Tuesday noontime I go out for a walk—exercise only, laps up and down the driveway. But on the third lap I grow bored and take a detour into the woods. A bird appears in the tree beside me, and then another, and another. One, two, three, four, five yellow-rumped warblers (all generously flashing their yellow rears and underarms) and one teeny tiny ruby-crowned kinglet. I don't have my binoculars, but I barely need them, the birds are so close. They move silently and efficiently, gleaning first one branch and then another, moving out of synch but more or less together in the same direction.

Not for the first time I marvel at the way that birds of completely different, unrelated species contentedly feed together when we humans barely get along with others of our own kind and only interact with other species when we are in the role of owner and they are pet or food or tool.

I accompany the small flock along the trail, until our paths fork, theirs taking them toward the swamp, mine looping back toward the house. In a clearing I pause and watch a white-breasted nuthatch whittle the branch of a dead elm tree. A confused spring peeper calls from the pond to my left, another calls back from the woods to my right. A cricket sings in the weeds, but the intensity of insect calls has greatly diminished after a handful of frosts.

When I reach the back side of the gravel pit, I see tiny birds rise and dance above the shrinking pond and give in, rush home to get my binoculars, and return. I find more yellow-rumps and a few others who will just have to be known as LBJs (little brown jobbies). A song sparrow hops around in the mud where turtles swam a couple of months ago.

Everyone by now has heard about the recent study that found a 29% decline in bird populations in North America over the last half century, with warblers being amont the hardest hit. I think about how many insects the handful of birds I just saw ate up in a matter of minutes. Are we facing not only a Silent Spring but also a Fatal Fall, in which caterpillars, with no warblers and kinglets to keep them in check, overrun the trees, devouring the leaves before they have a chance to feed the tree, let along turn gold-orange-red and drop to the ground?

Wild Wednesday ~ Nature Journal Recharge

A few weeks ago, our family attended a presentation by the naturalist Bernd Heinrich. After the talk, I picked up from the book sale table a copy of Heinrich's recent book collaboration with ecologist Nathan Wheelwright, The Naturalist's Notebook, which is a how-to guide for tracking nature's changes (phenology), with a five-year calendar/journal in the back.



It's a lovely, lovely book, with gold-edged pages and (my favorite) a built-in ribbon bookmark, illustrated with Heinrich's sketches and watercolors throughout.

While most of the information wasn't new to me, having read a lot of books about nature journaling and having gone through the Maine Master Naturalist program, I always appreciate a refresher and I especially liked the ideas of experimentation and citizen science presented throughout the book—ways of taking your nature experience beyond appreciation and observation.


I had been in a bit of a nature-journaling rut and just looking at Heinrich's illustrations inspired me to get out and get sketching.

The months I spent learning to use watercolor paints last winter finally paid off—this is the first time I've tried using them in a journaling format (other than a few stray and unsuccessful experiments over the years) and coincidentally, the art store changed brands of my preferred field notebook, to one with heavier pages that take the paint beautifully.



Heinrich describes his art supplies thus: "I use only number 2 pencils with erasers or Micron 01 indelible ink pens. I have eight brushes (but use no more than three) and two watercolor sets. Each set …holds 24 colors…. Most likely I received both sets as gifts when I was a teen and there is still enough paint left in both to last another lifetime…."



This inspired me to rethink my art supplies and drawing tools. Not that I have an excess of either, but I really do love trying out different media and adding to my large colored pencil collection.



So I've been experimenting with watercolor and number 2 pencil, and watercolor and colored pencils.



And I've been working on making the most of my different watercolor sets (three travel sets of various smallness, and a palette of colors squeezed from tubes), learning the different characteristics of each and figuring out how to maximize color combinations, especially with the little travel sets.

Most importantly, I've been using my journal to help me appreciate the natural world during these waning days of autumn and learn a little more about the world around me.

Wild Wednesday ~ One Week in Late August

Last Wednesday I went out and took some photos of late August happenings, with the full intention of writing a Wild Wednesday post, but then I got busy doing other things and it never happened. I considered a Wild Thursday or Friday post, but those days got filled up, too (oh, how glorious that school is back in session!!). Now here it is Wednesday again, and I thought I'd do a little compare and contrast from one week to the next.

Late August is goldenrod season around here, and a few species, including early goldenrod, were blooming.



Now the early goldenrod has gone by,



But several other species are coming online.



I haven't had a chance to go out with my field guide and identify  them yet (or re-identify, since I'm pretty sure I've learned them at least once or twice before).





Last week, most of the queen Anne's lace was on its way out, though a few were still blooming



By this week almost all (except for a few small ones here or there) have gone to seed.



The tall asters had come into full bloom last week,



And are still the predominant flower in the fields.



I had seen this puffball mushroom, about the size of a softball, on my morning walk up the driveway. By the time I came by again around noon, some little critter had nibbled away at it.



Over the next few days, it turned black and slimy and now this is all that's left. When you stamp on it—which is irresistible—it gives off its spores, like a cloud of purple smoke, which smells oddly of chocolate.



There were a few of these teeny tiny puffballs along the driveway as well, each about the size of a large grape, covered in a spiky white skin.



The skin dried and cracked, peeling away, leaving behind a brownish volcano that spurts little puffs of greenish-yellow spores.

One of my favorite flowers growing on our property is this sedum, called live-forever. Most of our wildflowers are white or yellow, and while I might not choose to dress in or decorate with magenta, I'm thrilled whenever it grow wild on my land.

It is, unfortunately, not so aptly named. Just a week later, and the blooms and stems have turned a rusty red.

What's wild in your neck of the woods this week?

Wild Wednesday ~ Damsels and Dragons

Naturalists are, by definition, generalists, but many, if not most, have a particular area of interest about which they are most knowledgeable—birds or flowers or rocks or moss or trees. Et cetera.

Powdered dancer (Agria moesta) and Variable dancer (Agria fumipennis)

Me? I know a little about a lot of things, nothing about some things, and a lot about nothing. Birds, I'm decent at, wildflowers, trees. But I don't really have that one thing. That one area of expertise. That passion.

Pond damsel spp?

As a result, since becoming a Maine Master Naturalist, a requirement of which is to share naturalist knowledge with others, I've taught classes in nature writing and nature journaling, my area of "expertise" and a naturalist skill that can be applied to whatever interest a person has.

Ebony jewelwing (Calopteryx maculata)

That being said, one realm I've been dabbling in for many years, and which is the thing that will be my "thing" once I take the time to really get to know it, is the Odonata—dragonfly and damselfly family.

Dragonhunter (Hagenius brevistylus)

Because they're just so darn cool.

There are 158 species of odonates in Maine alone, and some can only be identified under the so it might take me a while, but half the fun is in the chase.

Wild Wednesday ~ Browntail Moth

This might be as close to a PSA as I come with this blog. First, the saga: Saturday evening, I took a walk to the end of our driveway and back, as I often do several times a day. I'd heard some peeping sounds in the birdhouse where swallows make their home, and I made a detour to check out the box, squeezing between a pin oak and an apple tree, both with lots of low leafy branches, on my way there. About halfway home, I felt a stinging sensation on my neck. Assuming the noseeums, which had been out in force earlier in the week, were back at it, I brushed and slapped at the stinging spot, which seemed to move around and grow worse. Back at the house, I started to rub an after-bite stick on the spots that stung, but rather than soothing, the minty ointment intensified the stinging sensation. Then I noticed a small, brown, fuzzy caterpillar on my shoulder. I ran outside, brushed it onto the ground, and smashed it with a rock (I said "I'm sorry" to it as I did so; it should be noted that the caterpillar did not apologize to me). Then I ran in, shouted to C to look up browntail moth, and jumped into the shower, where I attacked the area with soap and water. By the time I got out of the shower, swollen red welts covered my neck and shoulder from sternum to nape. Meanwhile, C found a picture of the browntail moth larva online, and it looked roughly like me attacker, but a quick scan through the literature didn't offer much in the way of treatment advice, so I took a massive dose of Benadryl and another antihistamine we had leftover from one of the kids' rash episodes, and went to bed.

The next day, I posted a picture of my leprous skin on Facebook with a warning that the caterpillars had moved inland. My field guide describes the moths' range as "presently dunes, coastal strand communities, and adjacent woodlands from Maine to Cape Cod." Last I'd heard about the moths, was when M was a baby, 15 years ago, and I was strongly advised against taking him into a state park near the coast. But as advice and consolation came in from friends, I realized that they had invaded much of Central Maine this summer. I also realized there's not much you can do about them. Again with the field guide: "Its short, deciduous setae (or spicules) [i.e., "hairs"], tightly packed into the rusty brown tufts over the dorsum, are highly irritating to most people and produce pronounced dermatological reactions if numbers of them get embedded in the skin." Yeah, no kidding. It's not only close and intimate contact with the caterpillar that's a problem, but the setae can become airborne and get you as you walk around (I believe this happens when they pupate and shed the old skin). They like all woody plants, but prefer apple and cherry trees as well as beech and oak—all of which abound on our property. The thing to do, apparently, is to look for the webs in the winter and early spring, snip them off, and drop them in soapy water. Too late for that this year.

This summer, I have had a neck covered in blackfly bites, an imbedded tick, clusters of bites from noseeums that somehow found their way inside my pajamas, as well as several dozen mosquito bites, and a small patch of poison ivy. Not one of these irritants, however, has deterred me from going outside. After the browntail moth incident, however, not only did I want to stay inside, I was ready to burn down our entire 15 acres. Every time I stepped out, I got goosebumps (which, of course made my rash hurt more, as each hair follicle stood on end, tugging at the stinging, embedded setae) and I cringed away from all vegetation. Over the course of days, however, I started going out, almost as usual (though not stepping off our driveway) and today, I did a visual survey of our pin oak, looking for evidence of brown tailmoth larvae. This is the only caterpillar I found, and I wasn't entirely sure it was the offending specimen (I could have brushed my skin against it as a test, but I'm not that dedicated to science) until I enlarged the photo and saw the two indicative orange dots at the back end (they really weren't that visible at normal size, and they're this caterpillar's most distinctive feature).



As a PSA, this is not very helpful, since I have no idea what to do about the caterpillars or about going outside without getting a "pronounced dermatological reaction."A Tyvek suit, perhaps? One information sheet recommend long sleeves, long pants, tight collar, hat, polyester fabric (apparently less prone to the setae attaching than cotton). But the whole point of summer is to be able to go outside not suited up for an Arctic expedition! As far as treating the rash, among the various remedies people suggested was scrubbing the affected area with a brush. After reading this, I jumped in the shower, and scoured my neck with an exfoliating face wash and repeated the procedure the next morning. This helped immensely, and when a few more spots sprang up on my wrist, I went at them with a nail brush with the result of almost immediate relief. C, who had a small patch on his lower arm, remarked how satisfying this remedy is, when it's what you most want to do to a rash anyway, but are usually not allowed to do.

Update: More information about the caterpillars' lifecycle and marginally useful treatment info here.

Wild Wednesday ~ Small Wonders

There is so much going on in the natural world this time of year it's hard to take it all in. Birds! Flowers! Frogs! Bugs! I don't even know where to begin. Here's a smattering of small phenomena I came across the other morning. I stepped out on the front step and saw the dismembered remains of a June bug. Who perched on my porch and snacked on this beetle? My extensive research (googling "what eats june bugs?") turned up a lot of critters that dine on the grubs, but no mention of beetle-eaters. Any ideas?

The bluets (Houstonia caerulea) are still flowering here and there on the lawn. These are one of the first wildflowers to come out in spring and it's nice to see them still going strong (reigns in that "summer's going by too fast" sensation a bit).

E left his flip-flops in the driveway after we got home from camping and this nursery web spider (Pisaurina mira) thought the bottom of one was a dandy place to sun itself.

I've seen a few dragonflies here and there (more every day), but I've been stuck in bird mode—not yet in odonata mode. Time to dig out the net and the field guides and refresh my id skills. A few very cooperative specimens stopped to pose for a picture. This one I think is a stream cruiser (Didymops transversa).

I'm thinking this one is a lancet clubtail (Gomphus exilis).

And this one I'm pretty sure is delta-spotted spiketail (Cordulegaster diastatops).

And finally, Z discovered a robin's nest tucked in the kiwi vine that grows over our deck rail. Mama robin wasn't home when I poked my camera in to snap a shot, and I hope she returned soon after. It will be fun to witness little robins grow up right outside our back door.

What small wonders have you been noticing lately?