Busy Week

Last weekend was a busy week, this week has been busy as well and today we are expecting company for this weekend.  Here are a few photos from what has been happening but not much commentary.

We headed north on August 4 to attend a cousin's birthday party. We arrived in  northern Ohio early enough to take a quick driving tour of our three favorite birding areas beside Lake Erie.

At Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, I made a bathroom stop and noted a flyer on the receptionist's desk describing the American Lotus. I had been calling all the flowers with the big leaves growing in the water waterlilies. But now I know American Lotus grows on stems that extends well above the water.

Tom took this photo from the van at Metzger Marsh.

We had a good time at the potluck birthday party but were chased back to our van by an approaching storm since we were sitting outside.

The next day we went to the annual Smith family reunion. I have a photo of me attending it when I was six years old. The reunion has been held at a variety of places...the farm of Lena and Charles Smith, and then the farms and homes of their children. For the last ten or twenty years it has been held at what most of us call "the Ratner cabin".

There is always a potluck dinner at noon. I didn't take a photo until most people had had dessert but you can see there is some left for the nibblers.

We old folks talk and talk and talk and look at photos from reunions of the past.

 

The children have fun, too.

The reunion was lightly attended this year, probably because there was rain all morning. Some years there are close to two hundred attending. This year there were more than fifty but less than a hundred. But as Helen pointed out, "When there aren't so many people here, we get to talk with each one more. When there are a lot of people here, we get to see and say "Hi" to a lot of people."

She also told me about this beautiful fungus on one of the trees. The fungi is close to the size of a soccer ball.

When we returned home I immediately started gathering supplies for a Children's Drawing session on Tuesday. Other artists in the area teach on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. There were seventeen or eighteen young students, ages almost six through nine. Here is one drawing from the drawing session. I'll put all of them up this coming Tuesday.

Garbry Big Woods Sanctuary...October 10

October tenth was a beautiful day.  Tom decided it would be a good day to take video to turn into a treadmill video.  The treadmill videos are a set of DVDs that Tom is making so people walking on a treadmill can pretend they are taking a walk. People have discovered they exercise longer if they are "walking on a nature trail".

Here is Tom with the camera mount he rigged up. With this mount and his smoothly running scooter, he can get video that is steady.

Off he went down the trail. I followed after and here are some of the plants and other things I found.

This is White Snakeroot. If cows eat too much of this plant, they give tainted milk which can cause death. This caused the Milk Sickness that is believed to have killed Abraham Lincoln's mother.

Zig-zag Goldenrod. This is the goldenrod whose name I can remember. I always have to look up the other varieties in a field guide.

This seems to be a kind of Aster. I've always called it Woodland Aster but I don't find an aster by that name in my field guides.

I was surprised to find these. Puttyroot leaves are found throughout the winter but die and disappear before the flowers appear in mid May in our part of Ohio. It is in the orchid family.

Since finding the Giant Puffballs earlier this year and then the Dog Stinkhorn, I find myself looking for fungi. Here are some that I found.

Pretty little umbrellas.

These looked as though a woodland animal, perhaps a mouse, had been chewing on them.

These were tiny. If I hadn't been looking for fungi, I wouldn't have seen them.

I might have missed these, too. Below is a closer view.

There was no missing this one, a Giant Puffball. I was surprised it still looked fairly fresh. The ones at Charleston Falls have completely disappeared.

I found lots of evidence of leaf miners. The thought of tiny insect larvae so small they live between the top and bottom layers of leaves is mind boggling to me.

And Tom spotted this caterpillar. I wonder if it is some type of Tiger Moth.

Stinkhorn Fungus

On Monday, October 4, I mowed the grass. On Tuesday, Tom found this in the front yard. I wondered if I had, fortunately, not run a mower wheel  over it or if it had grown there overnight.

I told Tom I thought it was a dog stinkhorn. I was fairly sure I had seen one other fungi like this. I have been learning from naturalists for over thirty years and I vaguely remembered a naturalist identifying it.

The drawing in my copy of Non-Flowering Plants, A Golden Guide, looked similar to the one in our yard, but not exactly like it. I supposed that, like most species in nature, there were a number of similar related species. Although the fungi is called stinkhorn, the write-up in the book said this species did not have a strong odor. My nose isn't as discriminating as it once was but from eighteen inches away, I didn't notice a smell. I decided to use the stinkhorn for this week's blog but I didn't start further research until tonight. (8 PM on Wednesday). I wish I had started on Tuesday. I might have found the egg-like structure these fungi sprout from. Instead I took photos of the fungi nearly every day, watching it grow more and more callused and shriveled

One day I saw small flies and an ant on the fungi. I wondered if they were feeding on it. Tonight, when I finally did some on-line research, I learned that the stinkhorns attract insects with the spore-soaked slime with which they cover themselves. The insects carry off the spores which can then produce another stinkhorn somewhere else.

I also learned that the stinkhorns grow in just a few hours so the stinkhorn had appeared since I had mowed on Monday.

Two sources I consulted were MushroomExpert.Com and America's COOLEST Mushrooms - AmericanMushrooms.com.  Both have a lot of additional interesting information about the stinkhorns.

A Walk at Charleston Falls...July1

On Friday, Sarah stopped by in the afternoon and we went walking at Charleston Falls. The temperatures were in the eighties but we were comfortable as long as we were on the woodland portions of the trail. The open area at Cedar Pond was hot. I felt sweat tripping down my neck but there were redeeming sights making a little sweat a minor discomfort.

Come with us down the trail to the falls. This part is shaded. We spotted these two Jack-in-the-pulpits with seedpods developing. Later the seedpods will be a beautiful bright red. These two plants could be more accurately be named "Jills" since only the female plants bear seeds. Jack-in-the-pulpits plants can be male, female or neither depending on the quality of the soil in which they are growing and the nourishment they take in.

Here is a closer view of the developing pod.

There was very little water tumbling over the rocky cliff of the falls. We have not had much rain for a couple weeks. Usually we have a bit more rain this time of year.

We hiked down the only somewhat steep trail in the park, Redbud Valley Trail, crossed the creek on the bridge and headed up to Cedar Pond.

On that section of the trail, we saw a lot of Ebony Jewelwing Damselflies. This is the female. The male has entirely black wings. The bodies on both have a metallic sheen.

We passed a small planted prairie on the way. The prairie plants are beginning to bloom. The prairie will be full of flowers in a few weeks.

We saw a few Oxeye Daisies...

and a few Gray-headed coneflowers. They are also called Prairie coneflowers.

At the meadow around the pond we found Common Milkweed. They have a lovely delicate fragrance.

And on the milkweed we found...

a Black Swallowtail. I knew immediately that the butterfly was a swallowtail because of the swallow-like tails on the rear wings. I checked in my Butterflies of Ohio field guide to decide positively that it was the Black Swallowtail since we have three similar species. All are swallowtails, have mostly black wings and red-orange spots on the underside of the rear wings.


We saw only one Black Swallowtail and none of two similar species but we saw many Great Spangled Fritillaries. They are often as large as the Monarch butterflies, another of the large butterflies in our area. They are called Spangled because they have big silver spots on the underside of their rear wings. In this photo, you can see the silver spots on one of the butterflies and the topside of the other butterfly.

I am sure that Tom has taken a beautiful close-up of a Black swallowtail but I can't find it. He has been taking photos for a very long time. Some are slides, some were taken with predigital still cameras, and some are digital camera. I did find these two photos of Great Spangled Fritillaries. He printed them for me so I could paint from them. I have one of the paintings started but I want to buy silver watercolor to use on the rear wing so it is still incomplete.

Fungi Friday

Fungi FridayThe title is right because I plan to publish this on Friday.  However, the day my Friend, the Fungi Finder, found the following fruiting bodies of fungi was Saturday, May 27.  She mentioned as we started out on our hike that she had found lots of different mushrooms in her yard the last time she  worked on it.  That was not surprising.  We have had a lot of rain this spring.  April was the rainiest April since 1932 and May had above average rain fall.

My Firend, the Fungi Finder did a great job of finding fungi.  Lots of them were small enough that I probably would have missed them if I had been hiking by myself.

Here is my Friend, the Fungi Finder with her faithful companions.  Her companions probably would complain if we were doing a real hike.  Our hike was  actually a  walk on a well-maintained county park trail.

Here is the one I call Scalloped Fungi.  All of the names I've given these fungi are fanciful.  We didn't inspect them close enough to try to ID them.  Neither one of us know much about fungi so I doubt that we would have come up with any true names anyway.

This one I call Tiny Scaly Orange. The key gives you an idea of the size.

Another tiny one...Tiny Orange Toadstool. Again the key gives you an idea of the size.

Spotted Toadstools

Ring Pattern Toadstools

Both photos are of the same group of fungi.  I took each from a different angle. These tiny fungi remind me of the spread tails of turkeys.

I have an old Golden Guide to Non-flowering Plants.  At the time the book was printed fungi were still in the plant kingdom.  Now the fungi have a kingdom of their own.   They are important in a number of ways.  More about that another time.