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October Observations

The first full month of Fall has come and is nearly gone with Halloween just around the corner. Blink and you’ll miss it. Why time insists on whizzing by so fast these days is uncertain but may involve the fact that the older you get, the more time seems to speed up. Science data suggests that as we age, our ability to process images and experiences decreases even though time is actually moving at the same pace it always does. That may very well be, but one reason I almost never watch television anymore is the increasingly frantic pace of cutting from one scene to the next as well as the endless barrage of truncated ‘sound bites’ which convey little information that’s of any use. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this and like others I find it obnoxious.

Maybe that’s because I’m getting to be an old fuddy-duddy now or maybe my tolerance for baloney has permanently tanked. In any case, I’ve changed to walking more, paying more attention to reality and taking my entertainment in bite size chunks of my own choosing, rather than having it spoon fed to me by faceless corporations out to make a profit at my expense.

On the morning of October 10, about 11:30 AM, many people in southern New Hampshire, as well as parts of Maine and Massachusetts reported hearing a loud boom. Curiously neither of my brothers who both live in the southern part of the state heard anything out of the ordinary or if they did, attributed it to nearby noisemakers and thought nothing more of it. Scientists say there was no earthquake and the FAA says there was no military plane activity in the area. Most likely explanation is a bolide coming in from space exploding in the upper atmosphere. So unless the Air Force fesses up and admits one of their boys was hotdogging, the meteor explanation will have to suffice.

The Covid panic proceeds apace with no signs of letting up. There’s been a minor surge in the past few weeks here in New Hampshire, no doubt largely due to the influx of germ laden tourists during fall foliage season. It will no doubt subside in the coming weeks and resurface with the holiday seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Let’s face it, folks. Covid is here to stay and become another one of the ailments we have to chronically deal with, like influenza or norovirus.

The tree foliage here in Northern New Hampshire has peaked and leaves are now being shed with increasing speed, piling up at the side of the road, on top of lawns or spinning around madly in the backwash left by speeding cars. Colors were good but are quickly fading away from bright yellows and reds to less flamboyant yellow ochers and bronze shades. I’m trying to stay on top of the raking by going out in good weather (with hopefully no wind) and using an actual rake that I hold in my hands and scratch the ground with. Yes, people still use those things! Much quieter than a leaf blower plus you get a good aerobics workout.

Birds have begun migrating through, with the bulk of them being robins, sparrows and juncos. I’ve heard both flickers and pileated woodpeckers in the woods with their loud characteristic calls. Crows and blue jays are flying back and forth, probably checking out their digs for the winter and calling out anybody who tried to invade their territory. Squirrels and chipmunks are packing away the bonanza of acorns to help them tide over winter and mice are trying weasel their way into the woodwork of the house looking for a warm place to shack up in for the winter.

Chipmunks are especially amusing to watch as they cram seeds and acorns into pockets they have in their cheeks until they look like they have a dreadful case of the mumps. Very industrious, they don’t hibernate but do stock food away for the winter so they have something to feed on while the weather is foul and they have to lay low. These energetic little ground squirrels are surprisingly territorial, calling out their ownership with loud piercing bird-like chirps and pounding on any chippie who crosses the line, trying to invade. People get fooled by their cute appearance, thinking they’re sweet little animals. Don’t you believe it! These guys are little scrappers and are not above trying to bite off their opponent’s tail to assert dominance. It’s a rough and tumble world if you’re a chipmunk.

On a somber note, I recently witnessed the funeral procession of a local fireman who passed away suddenly. A twenty four year veteran, he had just retired, but sadly never got a chance to enjoy it. I watched the procession begin just after the services at the local Catholic church. Dozens of firemen from around the north country attended, in full dress uniforms with white gloves, standing at attention and saluting the flag draped coffin as it emerged from the church. The coffin was then loaded into the back of a fire engine for one last ride down Main Street past the local fire station where a huge American flag had been hung over the road.

American flag salute for fireman's funeral

Though I didn’t know the fireman personally, it was still a moving ceremony to watch, a recognition of his years of service and the respect he was held in.

Lastly is the weather. While we are experiencing fall like conditions now, it wasn’t until this past week that the first light frost hit some of the plants in my garden. This is extremely unusual as the first light frosts usually occur in mid to late September and a hard freeze usually by mid-October. While I’m not sure if this is a record for this area, the local weather reporter for WMUR did state this is the latest frosts have made their appearance in many years. While some may dispute global warming, I have seen too much evidence of it in recent years to doubt its existence.

Well, that’s all for this month. Have a peaceful Autumn, everybody.

Forest Notes for September

With the first day of fall officially come and gone, it is now time for autumn leaves, falling acorns, migrating geese and surprisingly enough caterpillars. More than a few species are searching around for places to hole up and pupate over the winter until the arrival of spring when they can emerge as butterflies or moths beginning the cycle of reproduction all over again.

Polyphemous moth caterpillar next to ruler

A few years ago, I was sweeping off the driveway when I spotted what at first appeared to be a walking green cigar. This proved to be a Polyphemus caterpillar nearly three inches long. He was moving along at a pretty good clip but fortunately I was able to grab a ruler and snap a decent picture of him. The Polyphemus moth (which he will eventually metamorphose into) is a large nocturnal moth with large eye spots on both wings. Named after the legendary cyclops, these moths are rarely seen but I was fortunate enough to discover one of their offspring.

These caterpillars are harmless, except to tree leaves, relying on their green coloration to hide them from predators looking for fat juicy bugs to nom. Others, like the monarch caterpillar, rely on a foul taste to deter predators, sporting bright colors to warn off anyone looking for a meal. Yucky but harmless.

But there are other caterpillars which are not quite so harmless. Many, like the gypsy moth caterpillar, are covered with irritating hairs which can produce rashes on susceptible people. Tussock caterpillars, like the one pictured below, also have irritating hairs which can cause problems for the sensitive, though they are not really that poisonous.

Tussock moth caterpillar sitting on strawberry leaf

While these insects may be interesting to look at, it is best to just look and not touch.

But the one you absolutely, positively should not touch under any circumstances is the flannel moth caterpillar. Like the one below they look strangely like a toupee someone has lost. But don’t be fooled.

These silly looking creatures sport highly poisonous stinging hairs which contain venom producing an unpleasant result if you are unfortunate enough to get stuck by one. Many people report it feels worse than a bee or wasp sting causing intense pain for the unlucky victim. Some are sensitive enough so they have wound up in the emergency room. I have not come across any references to fatal allergic reactions but the potential is always there. Look but don’t touch!

For those who are wondering what the coming winter may bring, some may take a look at the wooly bear caterpillar.

While this fellow sports stiff body hairs, the wooly bear is not toxic in any way. If you disturb them, they will curl up into an innocuous looking ball and lie still until it thinks the coast is clear. For some reason people have seized upon these little critters as a way to forecast the weather. If the brown band is wide, it foretells a mild winter. If it is narrow, then a rough winter is on the way. At the risk of bursting people’s bubbles, studies have not borne this out. In fact, I have seen wooly bears in the same year with differing widths in their brown bands. So unless you want to make out that one of them is a fibber, the caterpillars are a better sign that winter is just simply on the way than as to what kind of winter it will be.

So what is a good sign a cold winter may be on the way? Why, union suits pulled from storage and stuck out on the line to air out in preparations for blustery conditions of course! What else? Just a different kind of wooly.

long underwear or union suits on clothes line

Happy fall!

Forest Notes for August

Summer has been winding down the past few weeks much too fast for my liking with Labor Day less than two weeks away. Officially the first day of fall doesn’t arrive until September 22. The fall equinox is when day and night are of equal lengths, a mirror image of the spring equinox. Nature itself slowly segues from summer into fall rather than making an abrupt transition, giving us a chance to make our preparations for the season change.

It’s a bit too soon for the big leaf color change which leaf peeping tourists are so fond of as that really doesn’t get underway up here in Northern New Hampshire until the end of September and into early October. A few trees here and there are already making the transition but these are plants which are somewhat stressed and sickly, not surprising since we did have drought conditions early in the summer which makes life difficult for even the healthiest plants.

A better sign of late summer is the appearance of goldenrod and wild aster flowers, eagerly visited by bee, wasps and the occasional butterfly. Monarch butterflies begin their annual migration in August, travelling 50 to 100 miles a day, depending on weather conditions. These fall butterflies do not reproduce but head to wintering grounds where they hunker down, not moving northward until about March, breeding and surging back until the cycle is complete and a new migration begins

I have seen a handful of Monarchs these past few weeks which makes me hopeful the species can hold on but their wintering grounds are under seige from humans and climate change so unless the butterflies can adapt to these changes, the amazing migrations they make will likely become a thing of the past, like the migrations of passenger pigeons.

The flowers did well, once the rains finally came. Onion chives, marigolds, catchfly and cosmos all put on a good show attracting many insects. Bumblebees, small butterflies, solitary bees all visited the blossoms as they opened up. An unusual visitor also showed up, one I don’t see very often.

The sphinx moth often confuses people not familiar with wildlife. It beats its wings so fast, it sometimes gets confused with hummingbirds and in fact is sometimes called the hummingbird moth. This one paid numerous visits to the pink catch-fly flowers which seed themselves profusely in my vegetable garden and seem to ignore my efforts to try reseeding them in the flower garden where they belong.

The vegetable garden is winding down as well, with the wax beans petering out and the cucumber vines beginning to wither. Carrots and potatoes look good though I will not dig those up until the fall. In the case of the potatoes, I passed on the pricy seed potatoes being offered in the catalogs I receive. Instead, I took a few organic Yukon Gold spuds purchased at the local food coop, sliced them up and planted them. These sprouted quite well and grew quickly, producing flowers and remaining potato bug free. Interestingly, some of the blossoms went on to produce small fruit resembling green tomatos, not surprising since they are both members of the nightshade family. Potato berries (as they are called) are not edible, being full of solanine, giving them a bitter taste and inducing great intestinal distress for anyone silly enough to try and eat them. It is possible to get seeds from them, but as the potatoes are hybrids, they will not breed true. Still it might be an interesting experiment to try on some occasion, just to see what you get.

When venturing into deep woods, you may come across something like the picture below.

This is referred to as a nurse log. It is the result of a large tree dying, then falling to the ground. As it decays, seedlings take root on it and grow using the rotting trunk to fuel their own growth. It’s a form of recycling and is one of the reasons to leave dead wood where it falls, so that nutrients will remain for the next generation of trees. Some might complain that fallen trees create a fire hazard but fire is part of the natural cycle of growth. As with the process of decay, fire will help release nutrients faster, helping pave the way for new growth.

Seedlings are quick to exploit any new opening for themselves. Sometimes though, they do jump the gun a bit. On a morning walk, I noticed two tiny trees sprouting in the crotch of a still living tree. It’s not likely they’ll make it as the tree looks healthy and not likely to perish anytime soon.

Still, hope springs eternal. Hope your summer has been a good one.

Forest Notes for July

Hard to believe we’re well past midsummer and have only one full month of summer left. While the beginning of fall isn’t until late September, August has the feel of summer already winding down. With July you still have the ambiance of summertime without feeling you have fall and winter breathing down your neck. The above flower is bunchberry which blooms in spring but in midsummer produces bright red berries.

It’s actually a member of the dogwood family, blooming perennially and spreading itself on the forest floor. The berries are said to be edible but many people find them tasteless. I have never tried them and prefer to leave them for the birds and other critters in the forest.

Another flower which appears in July doesn’t even look quite like a flower. In fact it is often mistaken for some sort of fungus. This is easy to understand as unlike other plants it has no chlorophyll and is pale white.

Called ghost pipes or Indian pipes this little plant is classed with the heathers and other heath plants though you would never guess it to look at them. It is a parasitic plant, feeding off of mycorrhizal fungus which in turn live symbiotically with trees, usually beech trees. This unusual characteristic limits its habitat and makes it nearly impossible to grow in your garden unless you have exactly the right conditions.

As for fungi themselves, I didn’t see much of them in the earlier part of the summer when we were under semi-drought conditions. But over the past three weeks, we have been receiving an abundance of rain which has stimulated them to send up fruiting bodies. They come in an amazing assortment of sizes and colors, some edible, some definitely not.

Fungi were originally included in the category of plants but once DNA sequencing hit its stride, it was discovered that they are actually in a class of their own and are more closely related to animal forms than they are to plants. In fact the biological tree of life we used to see in our old biology textbooks has gotten very complex and gnarly thanks to recent discoveries using DNA sequencing.

This diagram has been redrawn many times by scientists and will likely be tweaked repeatedly for some time to come. It bears remembering that the above drawing exists mostly for our own convenience in trying to make sense of the intricate biosphere we are part of. Organisms are under no obligation to fit neatly into this diagram. In fact there are a few that seem to delight in bamboozling us as to how to categorize them. One good example is the slime mold.

There are hundreds of ‘species’ of this bizarre life form. It lives most of its life or lives as single celled organisms. Then under the right environmental conditions, all the cells move together, congeal and form a single ‘body’ we refer to as a slime mold. Some molds form a single gigantic ‘cell’ with multiple nuclei while others maintain their single cell arrangement but unite with others and move as though they were a single organism. They seem to occupy the borderline between single cell bacteria and multi-celled critters like ourselves, cheerfully switching back and forth over the border depending on environmental circumstances. Scientists eagerly study these strange organisms hoping to gain insights into how multi-celled life may have got its start.

Slime molds are mostly harmless to humans and serve an important role in breaking down dead matter and recycling it. I actually came across one type of slime mold a few weeks ago.

This is known by the rather charming name of dog-vomit slime mold and it did look rather like something a dog might have up-chucked. As slime molds ooze about very slowly, I went back later in the day hoping to check on how far it had shifted, only to discover to my dismay, it had vanished. Had it slithered under the pine needles? Or finished its life cycle? Hard to say. But slime molds move according to their own rhythms, not ours.

It’s weird to watch time-lapse videos showing how slime molds get around. For all their seeming simplicity, they are remarkable complex life-forms which still hold many mysteries for curious humans to explore. Not for the first time it makes me wonder if we will ever recognize alien life-forms if we can barely even make sense of the creatures here on earth that are related to us yet utterly different in their approach to life. It’s easy to forget how provincial we are until we find ourselves face to face (?) with a slime mold.

Hmmm. So was that really a slime mold? Or an extraterrestrial exploring our strange planet? Inquiring minds want to know.

See you next month.

Forest Notes For June

The month of June has certainly whizzed by fast. It seems as if I just barely got the gardens planted and here it is less than two weeks away from the Fourth of July. I’m hoping the tiger lilies will make a showing this year. I have been diligently drowning Scarlet Lily beetles in soapy water (eschewing chemical pesticides) and so far have kept any beetles grubs from devouring the leaves and buds. In spite of the near drought conditions this past spring, enough rain has fallen so many plants are doing well.

The local Water and Light Department went around this past winter cutting back tree branches and shrubbery from the overhead wires. They trimmed back some of the branches on the two Washington Hawthorn trees on the front lawn, which must have been a major undertaking as the trees are gifted with two inch long needle sharp thorns which they aren’t afraid to use. But the trimming didn’t phase the hawthorns as they leafed out well this spring and are now in full blossom. One thing I didn’t discover until the lower branches began producing flowers as well as the upper is that this particular variety of hawthorn has flowers that – well – smell like something died. This hasn’t stopped bees from visiting it as well as the expected flies, wasps and other odd-looking insects. Makes me wonder what the honey might taste like.

Another much less welcome plant has shown up again as well. That would be poison ivy (the plant, not the DC villainess)

The photo above shows the leaves at dead center. Most people know the adage; ‘Leaflets three, let it be’. But there’s another rhyme associated with the plant which is less well known. ‘Berries white, take flight!’ The plant has non-descript tiny flowers which produce whitish berries. These are toxic to humans but not to birds who devour them without any hesitation. The seeds in the berry survive the trip through their digestive tracts and get excreted with a nice little packet of bird guano to give them a good start. So if you are wondering how those darn poison ivy vines started growing where none had been before, that’s how. I use long handled clippers for trimming them back as far as I can without risk to myself, not being brave and bold enough to try pulling them up by (gloved) hand.

Within the past few decades, another vine has made its appearance here in northern New Hampshire. Virginia Creeper now grows rampantly along local roadsides often overwhelming other plants. It has occasionally been mistaken for poison-ivy but only by people who can’t count. Poison-ivy has just three leaves, while Virginia Creeper has five.

While it is native to North America, it is sometimes classed as an invasive due to its exuberant growth. Because of its handsome dark red color in the fall, people have sometimes planted it as an ornamental only to rue it afterwards.

Given how fast it has spread around the area here over the past few years, it would probably qualify as America’s answer to Kudzu. However while Kudzu is actually edible, Virginia Creeper and its dusty blue berries are to be avoided due to their oxalic acid content which can cause digestive upset and even kidney problems. As with poison-ivy berries, birds are not bothered by this substance and can eat them without worrying about intestinal blowback. Many songbirds relish them and turkeys will eat them as well. With the recent boom in the population of turkeys introduced to this state starting back in the Seventies, their favorites foods have spread along with the birds themselves; Virginia Creeper, grapes, and (gulp) yes, poison ivy.

Although I live in a residential neighborhood in town, a surprising number of animals still share the area with the humans who have overrun it. Bears will trash feeders if available, woodchucks and raccoons will cheerfully raid unprotected gardens and what they don’t get, the deer will polish off. Chipmunks and grey squirrels are ubiquitous along with the occasional red fox. Once several years ago I spotted a bobcat trotting across my lawn early in the morning in a very business-like fashion. Not sure if he was a vagabond or if he actually lived in town. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did as there is enough prey around to support a townie lifestyle. Most of these critters stay carefully out of sight so it’s easy to be startled by how many there actually are. The Covid lockdown last year emptied the streets of humans and as a result a surprising number of critters popped out of the woodwork much to the astonishment of many people.

Each summer presents its own challenges as well as pleasant experiences. It will be interesting to see what July brings to the table. Happy Summer!

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