Up to the UP - Part 5, Still Day 3

So, here we are, at the visitor center at the Upper Taquamenon Falls.  Interestingly, this facility is apparently privately owned and is not part of the state park.  Signs alert visitors to exactly where they leave state land and step onto private property.

There's a brewery at one end, and we stopped in to see if they had restrooms we could use (it had been a long morning).  No restrooms for the public (unless you ate in the restaurant), but they did have this great eagle overhead.  Loved its catch (zoom in to see what's in its feet)!

After locating the public restrooms, we headed for the falls.

Along the way we took in the scenery.  Mountain ash was in bloom.  Looking closely at the leaves, I believe this is American mountain ash, which I've never seen before.  There were rumors of this in the Adirondacks, but all we ever saw was the European variety, which is taking over.  Hooray - a new plant to add to my life list!

And I've now finally seen an American beech in Michigan that has the beech scale disease.  So far all the beeches I've encountered have been free of it, but the disease is here, no doubt.

The day was not really warming up, and we found this yellow and black dragonfly trying to eek out some warmth from the asphalt path.  It was so chilly that it let me pick it up and put it on my hand.  After a photo shoot, I placed it on a maple leaf where the sun would hit it if it ever came out, and it would avoid being squashed by an errant visitor, dog, or stroller.  On our way back down the path an hour or so later, it was back on the asphalt, still hoping for some heat.  Thanks to a dragonfly expert we know (thanks, Don!), this has been identified as a mustached clubtail, and one that is newly emerged based on the shininess of the wings and the fact that the eyes have not reached their full adult color yet.

Soon we were getting glimpses of the falls through the trees.

But this was not all I glimpsed.  With my eyes cast ever downward looking for plants, I soon spotted early coral root, a saprophytic plant in the orchid family.

The green and white flowers are very small, 

but their orchidness is beyond doubt.

Looking around we found quite a number of these plants...I wonder if any other visitors saw them.  They all seemed to be along just the one side of the trail.  On the other side we found this strange-looking thing.  It's not a pale asparagus...it's squawroot, a root parasite that especially likes oaks.

I was now on a mission...what other cool plants would I find?  Another coral root soon presented itself.  This was one I'd never seen before...and it wasn't in Newcomb's!  The wife of one of the birders is a plant afficianado and I later emailed them the photo for ID.  It is striped coral root, Corallorhiza striata.  What a spectacular plant.  It has the largest flowers of all the coral roots.

The falls kept calling to us, though, so we continued down the trail.

An American redstart was also calling to us.  I've heard these birds, but I've never had a good look at one.  This one cooperated enough that I was able to get a quick photo of it.

It was now time to descend to the falls.

Ninety-four steps are not as many as you might think.

A wooden observation platform has been built right at the edge of the falls.  These falls drop about 40 feet...much more impressive than the lower falls we had seen the day before.  

Paul told us how when he was a youngster he walked along the bare shoreline below the falls right up to the cascade.  From there he walked behind the falls, with the rock wall on one side and the crashing waters on the other.  We peered at the spot where he said he'd done this...I don't think you could reach it today.

The Tahquamenon River was used for shipping logs downstream back in the big timber days of Michigan's past...much like the rivers back in the Adirondacks had been used.

Day Three of our trip came to a close with the group all meeting up for dinner at Pizza Hut.  It was there that we discovered that the birders had become mushroom hunters that afternoon.  They had followed the advice of the fellow we met at dinner the night before, and revisited one of the burns in search of morels.  Their search resulted in a fairly good harvest of these much-sought-after mushrooms.

Stay tuned for the final day of our trip...

Death Eaters at the VIC

How could something so small and delicate have such a gruesome reputation? Here it is: early coral root (Corallorhiza trifida), one of nature's saprophytic plants. (That there is my finger next to it, to give you an idea of size).




Up close, it's really a beautiful little thing, an orchid in miniature. But, despite its greenish color, this plant cannot make its own food. Instead, it gets it nourishment from dead and/or decaying matter, hence the term saprophyte.



Our interns and I stumbled across this flowering death eater (ha ha - couldn't resist - and yes, I am a Harry Potter fan) along the Rich Lake Trail this rainy afternoon. We found not just one, but several, some growing singly, others in little clusters.

I love saprophytic plants - they are lovely, unusual, and fill an important niche in our world. Beauty is everywhere - even tiny - even in death.

One-flowered Cancerroot - a short tale

About, oh, four years ago, while mowing one of the paths through the “field” portion of my yard, I came across this strange flowering plant. It was a pale pinkish-lavenderish color, with yellow down the throat, and no discernable leaves. In fact, it had no green on it anywhere – the stem was as ghostly in color as the flower. Upon consultation with my trusty “Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide,” I determined it was one-flowered cancerroot (Orobanche uniflora), aka: ghost pipe, and naked broomrape.

I looked for it the following year, but didn’t see it again until yesterday, when I was once again mowing a path around my “field.” I found not one flower, but several separate clusters, and none in the same place as the ones I discovered four years ago. As it turns out, this delicate plant rarely appears in the same place twice.




So today I began a search for information on one-flowered cancerroot. As it turns out, there is not a whole lot of information “out there” about this plant; most of what I found was clinical statistics, like height, color, habitat. Still, weeding through it all I think I can piece together a fairly interesting natural history of this ephemeral plant.


O. uniflora is a member of the Broomrape Family. All but one member of this family are parasitic, unable to produce their own food via photosynthesis (hence the lack of green parts). Instead, broomrapes obtain their food (and water) from other herbaceous plants (such as clover, saxifrage and sunflowers) via their roots, which attach to the roots of their oblivious host plants.

A denizen of damp woodlands and thickets across much of North America, one-flowered cancerroot is described as rare or of special concern in many locations, while in general it is considered to be common. Since the plant only grows 3-10” tall, and is often hidden among its taller neighbors (and rarely grows in the same place twice), I imagine it can be difficult to ascertain a concise record of its presence.

Based on photographs I found on the internet, this flower varies in color from a real purple to essentially white. It has a splash of yellow down its throat (reproductive parts), and the stem is sticky (at least according to descriptions; I felt the ones in my yard and while they do have some fine hairs along their stems, they were not sticky). According http://www.illinoiswildflower.info/, one-flowered cancerroot is pollinated by bumblebees. Based on the flower structure, this does not surprise me. I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled the next sunny day that I’m home and see if a bumblebee visits “my” clusters of flowers.

It seems that cancerroot seeds can stay dormant in the soil for quite some time – up to several years – just waiting for the right chemical compounds to become available in the soil courtesy of other living plants. Once the seeds germinate, their roots seek out host roots and latch on, stealing water and nutrients in order to keep themselves alive.

I paged through my Native American Ethnobotany tome to see if anyone had a use for this strange plant, and while other members of the genus Orobanche were used for a variety of medicines, O. uniflora apparently never has been. Two of its relatives, beechdrops (Epiphagus virginiana) and squawroot (Conopholis americana), are known for their astringent properties. As for the name “cancerroot,” it seems it was applied without much forethought, merely taking into account that other members of the family do have medicinal properties.

And there you have it: one-flowered cancerroot. 2008 seems to be a good year for it, at least in my yard. This is a spring-flowering plant (April through June), so the next time you find yourself in damp woodlands or thickets (or unmowed lawns near the forest’s edge) before the summer solstice, keep an eye turned to the ground and scan for these pale purplish plants. Let me know if you see any bumblebees pollinating them.