A Morning En Route to the Fen

Friday I decided it was high time I went out on the trails, especially since I had heard of some good finds out in our little fen.  So, camera in hand, I hit the trails.  

My first stop was the native plant gardens around the end of our building.  These gardens have been established to show visitors a) what our native plants look like and b) how they can be just as lovely in our gardens as any horticultural plant from overseas.

The showstopper right now is Queen of the Prairie, which is blooming beautifully! I had one of these show up in the "wild area" of my yard back in Newcomb - no one knew what it was, for it isn't a native plant for the Adirondacks.  How it got there, we will never know.

In the woods and along the ways pokeweed is just starting to bloom.  This is a plant I learned a year or two ago from my friend Jackie, who introduced it to me along a canal near Schuylerville, after we stopped at a cider mill for apples, cider and homemade donuts.

We have quite a healthy population of pokeweed here.  In fact, here is a shot of me in front of our most robust population of this plant.  I am just under 5.5' tall, and these plants, as you can see, are well above my head.  They are a native plant, which produces purple berries later in the season.  These berries are hugely important to  our birds, so this is a great plant to have on your property if you want to attract wildlife!

The small pond out along the trail is carpeted in green.  The hot weather and lack of rain seem to have done the pond plants well.

 My goal, however, was the prairie and the fen.  What was blooming?  I was wasn't surprised to find butterflyweed flowering, since it is in bloom all over the place.  This member of the milkweed family does very very well out here in southern Michigan.

The spiderworts are starting to fade, so soon there will be seeds to collect.  This fella, though, wasn't after the seeds.  When I tried to look this caterpillar up, I came across two possibilities:  salt marsh moth and yellow bear.  I sent the image off to BugGuide and it immediately came back identified as the salt marsh moth.  Really?  But there are no salt marshes around here.  Turns out, we have to look at the history of this critter to understand how it got its name.  It was named in the 1770s, when it was "discovered" by early settlers, who first found it along the eastern coast, in the salt marshes.  This moth, however, lives in other habitats, but the name stuck.

Bee Balm!  Monarda!  Here we have our native monarda, which is such a lovely lavender color.  I had some of this in my gardens in Newcomb, but it is so nice to see it growing in the wild, where it belongs.  A favorite of butterflies, bees and hummingbirds, it is a native plant we should all encourage. 

I was a bit surprised to see a lobelia in the prairie.  This is spiked lobelia, and while it is a native prairie plant, in my mind I still see lobelias as wetland species.

Another new plant for me was blooming out on the prairie:  flowering spurge.  Like so many of the plants here, it had a difficult time identifying this, but one of our staff sat right down with me and worked it out.  "I'm pretty sure its a spurge," he said, and sure enough, with some intense thumbing through books, we found it.  Apparently once we reach mid- to late summer, these plants will make the prairie look like it is covered with baby's breath.

Black/brown-eyed Susans are just coming out now, too.  Nothing says summer quite like these lovely sunny flowers.  

Here we are at the fen, my target.  I was surprised by just how much water was out here.  We haven't really had any rain of any significance for about a month (writes she, as a humdinger of a thunderstorm rolls overhead), and yet there were channels of water still out in the fen.

This was my target:  sticky tofieldia.  It was "discovered" out here last week by a fen specialist from The Nature Conservancy, making it a new plant for our native plant list.  I know this plant from the Ice Meadows along the Hudson River in the Adirondacks, so I was delighted to find it here.

Now, this plant really threw me for a loop.  I thought "loosestrife" when I saw it, but it wasn't swamp candles and it wasn't fringed.  Nothing else matched it in my Newcomb's Field Guide.  I was frustrated.  When I came back to the office, Mark took one look at it and said "Oh, that's prairie loosestrife."  Which, just for the record, is NOT in Newcomb's!  Whew!  I was beginning to lose all faith in my favorite flower book and in my skills at keying out plants!

It was definitely a dragonfly sort of day.  This lovely twelve-spotted dragonfly obliged me with a perfect pose on a twig in its territory along the edge of the trail.

My favorite, however, was this one.  When I saw it, what caught my eye was a flash of copper - metallic copper.  The flash washed across the wings and body alike.  I tried to sneak up on it to snap a photo, but the flighty thing just wouldn't stay still in one place long enough.  It was frustrating.  But, then I discovered that there were quite a number of them darting about the prairie.  With extreme patience, I was finally able to get a couple shots good enough for ID:  it is an immature male widow skimmer.

Finally, when I was back in the woods, I ran across a couple populations of these small, woolly insects.  I thought they were some kind of woolly aphid, but when I sent the photo off to BugGuide, it turned out to be a juvenile flatid planthopper - Anormenis chloris.

 

So, it turned out to be a great day of discovery.  Several new plants, some new insects - what more could a girl want?!

Odds and Ends

Thursday, while cutting food for our caterpillars at work, I found this egg case.  It was difficult to photograph because the outside was hard and shiny.  It turns out that it is the egg case of the eastern tent caterpillar.  HM...now what to do?  Tent caterpillars are certainly destructive, but I believe they are a native insect, so it's hard to be totally against them.

Meanwhile, our search continues for monarch eggs and larvae.  It's been a poor year so far for monarchs.  These things tend to go in cycles, but down years are always so sad.  The wee caterpillar I brought in perished, and so did one of the two older ones we had.  The survivor, however has become a crysalis, so we are very happy about that.

We were even happier when Carrie (one of our naturalists) found these three monarch eggs out in the Children's garden.

Monarch eggs are very small - it takes a good eye to find them.

My walks along the roadside have turned up another new plant!  This one is a wild four o'clock, which took us quite some time to ID.  It's another native (whoo-hoo!) and is rather lovely.  In some areas this plant can become a weed, probably because it does so well in dry, sandy soils.

It's gotta be summer, for the chickory is blooming!

All around this area we have wild grapes.  Dare I compare it to kudzu?  Wild grape vines are draped over almost every surface:  trees, shrubs, and even just the ground.  They are native, so that's a plus, and it means the fruits are good for our native birds.  And, it turns out there is more than one variety of wild grape out there.  This one, I think, is summer grape, but I need to go and take a closer look at it to be sure.

I finally found some saint johnswort!  I was looking for this plant last month to use for my summer solstice walk, but could I find even one?  Nooooo.  Now, however, it seems to be blooming everywhere.  Apparently no one told the plants here in Michigan that they are supposed to bloom for the summer solstice.

 

 

Sunny Days

 Man-o-Pete!  We've had some VERY Guamish weather recently.  It was soooo humid that the bathroom mirror was fogged up  - and I don't even use the shower in this bathroom!  And this was first thing in the morning.  Gah!

In fact, it was so humid, that when I went out to photograph this lovely spicebush swallowtail that I found in the road, my camera lens was all fogged up!  Luckily I was able to dry it off enough to get some nice photos.
 

This is a butterfly that I didn't really get much chance to see back in New York, but here it is quite prevalent.  No doubt this is because spicebush, a major food source for its larvae, is a common native shrub in these here parts.

In my humble opinion, this is one of our most strikingly beautiful butterflies. 

Meanwhile, out in the lawn, which I have to mow daily because it is so large and I can only do small patches at a time, I found these strange plants with layered leaves.  Not knowing what they were, I left a couple uncut to see what would blossom.

Overnight they came into bloom, especially along the roadsides.  It is yellow goatsbeard, Tragopogon pratensis, which is a non-native plant that is considered somewhat invasive.   >sigh<  Still, it is a rather lovely flower.

Another invasive that has been blooming in great abundance these last couple of weeks is honeysuckle.  The flowers can be very beautiful, but the plant is terribly invasive and the scent, well, some folks might like it, but to me it is a cloyingly sweet perfume - bleh!  Too much.

I took some time Thursday afternoon to walk out to the prairie at work to see what was blooming, since I have a walk to lead this afternoon.  Forest flowers are pretty much past their blooming time, now that the leaves are out and the ground is shaded, but now is the time of the flowers that grow in open areas.  Soon the prairie spaces should be alive with color.  Right now, however, white and yellows seem to be the only colors on tap.

This could be wild parsnip or meadow parsnip.  

I need to go back out and double check.

A new life-list flower for me:  yellow stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta).

This sweet little flower is growing right next to the cinquefoils, which

are the same bright yellow, but with five rounded petals.  

A sharp eye will see the difference.

Now, when I first saw this flower, I thought "blue-eyed grass," but

as I looked closer, I said "no...something's not right."  So, out came

my copy of Newcomb's and I keyed it out:  

stout blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium). 

 An important characteristic to ID this plant is the rather stout,

winged stem.  Another life list species for me!

Ah - wild columbine, one of the true beauties of the plant world.

(Aquilegia canadensis)

 I snuck out to the edge of the fen, which doesn't have an official path since we don't want a lot of folks going out here and trampling sensitive vegetation.  A fen is a type of wetland that is characterized by more alkaline chemistry than a bog (which is acidic).  Southern Michigan used to be covered with many of these fens.  A few still remain and are often very rich with wildflowers long-gone from the rest of the state.  This is why this fen is sort of kept secret.

Well, out there in the tall grasses were white balls of flowers.  I had to know what they were, so I crept along the edge until I found a dry(ish) path that brought me right up to one.

Hm...it looks familiar.

It turns out this is swamp valerian (Valeriana uliginosa).  I have grown

regular old ordinary valerian in my herb gardens over the years 

(it is a gentle sedative), but this native variety of the American 

wetlands was one more for my life list. 

 

I set out next across the prairie, to see what was starting to bloom.

These small white flowers were rather numerous.  Native or alien?

I keyed them out as hoary alyssum (Berteroa incana) - invasive alien. 

Apparently it is quite common now here in the Midwest.

Plenty of milkweed was coming up, though - hooray!  A native!  

And, just to let us know how appreciated it is, a monarch butterfly was soaring

above, looking for places to lay her eggs.  Carrie and Gary were out here

earlier in the week and watched a monarch as she placed egg

after egg on the underside of a milkweed leaf.  This is why it is

so very important to keep native vegetation around: our native insects

depend on it for food!

I found quite a number of these really dusty-looking webs woven

at the tips of old dried grasses. 

And inside each one was a small grey spider.  

I have to find my spider ID book before I can hazard a guess on species.

Daisy fleabane is in full bloom now.  How wonderful to discover that

this flower, also known as Sweet Scabious (Erigeron annuus), is a native plant.

I added one more flower to my life list this morning while walking the dog:

hairy beardtongue (Penstemon hirsutus).  I've seen other beardtongues before,

but this purple one was new.  And, as I scrambled up the slope of the

roadside ditch to photograph it, I found it was surrounded by 

our good friend poison ivy.  I sure hope I have avoided serious

contact, remembering the ordeal I went through last year!

This week ended up quite pleasant, once the heat and humidity broke.  Today, however, it looks like the hazy weather is returning.  Still, there is a nice breeze blowing, so I am quite looking forward to this afternoon's walk.  Perhaps the native spiderworts are now open on the prairie!

Search for Winter Stoneflies

When one thinks of outdoor winter activities within the snowbelt, wading in streams and rivers in search of aquatic invertebrates isn't usually the first thing that jumps to mind.  Nonetheless, that was on today's agenda: a winter stonefly search in the Grand River Watershed.

This semiannual event is held by the fine folks who work for the Jackson County Conservation District, and is sponsored by several environmental organizations, including the Dahlem Conservancy, which hosted today's workshop.

We started the workshop indoors, receiving a brief overview of the the target insects:  winter stoneflies.  These insects are rather unique, for they emerge in the winter.  Although many of our aquatic invertebrates are active in the winter (as you will see below), these are among the few that actually "emerge" during this chilly season.  There were two families of winter stoneflies:  Capniidae, the "small winter stonefly", and Taeniopterygidae, simply called the "winter stonefly". Of the two, the former is considered much more common, and, just as a point of reference, I wrote about these last winter (see here; you will have to scroll about halfway down the post).

These aquatic insects actually hatch in late winter or early spring.  Things warm up a bit, they migrate a whole meter or so downstream to a rockier location, and enter a period of suspended animation called diapause.  Here they hang out for upwards of six months (summer) and wait for the water to cool off again in the fall.  The cooler temps awaken these sleeping beauties and they begin an aggressive regimen of feeding.  All fall and winter they feast, and come late winter/early spring, they change into adults and emerge (again, see photo previously posted, as noted above).  The cycle begins again.

Paul, the aquatic entomologist in the group, brought in a couple buckets of material from the stream running through Dahlem's property to give us an idea of some of the creatures we might encounter.

 There weren't any stoneflies in the sample, but we did find some terrific critters.

A gigantic damselfly nymph; in all my years of pond and stream studies, 

I've never seen one this large.

Two impressive caddiflies peeking out of their cases:  

one made of sand and tiny stones, the other made of vegetation.

This brilliant yellow caddisfly is case-less; likely a fingernet caddisfly.

They get their name from the fine mesh nets they weave to strain

debris from the water as it rushes past; this is their food.

 We found these greenish caddisflies at our sample site, but I'm including them

here along with the other caddisflies just so you can see all the variation.  

I'm guessing these are common netspinner caddiflies, which have 

branched gills on their sides, fluffy projections from their nether regions, 

are often found outside their protective cases, and 

when captured tend to curl up in a "C".

We had 22 people at the workshop, a record number, and each was assigned to a team.  There were four teams in all, each assigned a different stream or river for sampling.  My team headed south of Jackson to the little village of Liberty.  Our body of water:  the Grand River.

I know, it doesn't really look all that grand, but this is the headwaters region, so the river is more of a stream at this location.

Looking upstream we see the dam that holds back the waters of the mill pond.

Stoneflies in general live in fast-moving, cold water.  The colder the water, the more oxygen it holds.  The cleaner the water, the more stoneflies it holds.  In other words, studies such as this are an easy way to assess water quality:  if stoneflies are present, the water is pretty clean.  Bioindicators - that's what stoneflies are.

Even though winter stoneflies are especially adapted to living in icy cold waters, humans aren't.  Two of our members donned chest waders and headed into the water.  Their job was to capture stoneflies (and any other aquatics that ended up in their nets).

Working their way slowly upstream, they scraped their nets along the bottom of the stream/river, kicking over rocks, ruffling up vegetation. 

All sampled matter was transferred into a bucket...

...then brought to shore and emptied into trays.  Using tweezers, we poked through the sampled debris and snagged any wiggling creatures we found.  These were transferred to...

...ice cube trays for easy viewing and identification.

And here it is, the star of the day:  a Taeniopterygidae stonefly. All in all, our group found five of these critters.  We didn't find any of the smaller (and more common) species.  In fact, of all the stoneflies found today (upwards of 50), only one group found a single Capniidae stonefly.

We found two kinds of mayflies.  Here is a sample of the flat-headed mayfly:

And here we have another mayfly, possibly a brushlegged mayfly (the front two legs are quite fluffy at the foot ends).  Brushlegged mayflies also have a distinctive cream-colored striped down their backs.  It obligingly spread all its gills out for me in this photograph.

The curled up creature on the right below is a scud, or side-swimmer.  It looks kind of like a shrimp.  In fact, it is a crustacean.  Interesting factoid:  the word "scud" comes to us from Norway.  The Norwegian word is skudda, which means push.  (Hm...is this also the root for scooter?)  And, as one might guess, the name "sideswimmer" refers to the way it swims:  on its side.  A bit of a no-brainer, that.

The one on the left is an isopod.  These are essentially aquatic sowbugs, those multi-legged land crustaceans you find rippling their way through your garden soil. 

Here are a couple more isopods.  There are about 130 species of isopods in North America.  I haven't made a study of them, so there isn't too much I can tell you about them.  On the whole, they are essentially omnivores, mostly consuming small particulate debris, but not disinclined to nibble on other living things should the opportunity present itself.  Apparently some species develop a fondness for watercress, potentially wreaking havoc in commercial watercress beds.

We hauled in two backswimmers.  This one was quite large, and had quite an appetite, as you will see in a moment.  Backswimmers, as their name suggests, swim around on their backs, using their long legs like oars in a rowboat.

Look at all those find hairs on the foot (out behind the insect - completing a stroke)!  They must create a lot of surface area, greatly enhancing the thrust of each stroke.  Also, if you look at its back, which is below (remember, it is swimming on its back - upside-down), you will see it looks like it has a clear bubble attached to it.  That's because it does.   Here's what it says about the air-storing abilities of these insects in A Field Guide to Common Freshwater Invertebrates of North America:  "They breathe by taking an air store underwater.  The air store is held in two troughs with fringes of hair on the bottom side of the abdomen.  Additional air is carried under the wings and between the head and thorax."

This fellow was rather aggressive and before long it had discovered a damselfly cowering in the bottom of the ice cube cubicle.  It dove down and snagged it - an easy meal.  Using its beak-like mouthparts, it pierced the soft body of its prey and sucked the life out of it.  The empty husk was later discarded.  And yes, if they object to someone handling them, these insects are known to use their beaks to bite the hand that holds them.  I hear it is rather painful.  Just ask the damselfly.  Oh, wait...it's too late for that.

We also caught this small giant water bug.  Giant water bugs can get close to three inches in length, and like the backswimmer above, it is a fearsome predator.  It, too, has a piercing mouthpart that sucks the life out of its victims.  It was placed in the ice cube tray in the same cube as the backswimmer.  It couldn't have been too hungry, for even though the legs of these two predators tangled more than once in the cramped quarters of the cube, it never seemed interested enough to attempt to eat its compatriot.

We spent about 45 minutes sampling, gathering over 15 families of insects, including many blackfly larvae.  It was a pretty good haul.

Our final conclusion:  the water is pretty clean.  In fact, all four teams came back with good results.  Everyone found at least a few stoneflies, and one group had over 30!  Not a bad way to spend a cold winter's day.