This Week in the Woods, we discovered a daredevil green frog in a patch of clover a good half mile from any pond or stream. Our guess it that it was hunting, and all the humidity and rain allowed it to hop where it had never hopped before. As noted in the short video found on this Vermont Reptile and Amphibian Atlas page, although green frogs breed and live in aquatic habitat, they leave the water at night to feed. This is a summer-singing species (you can hear their “banjo string” call late into July) which lays its eggs in ponds and other permanent wetlands. As the video also notes, tadpoles spend at least one winter in the water before developing into mature frogs.
Here are some other nature sights this week (clockwise):
The fungi parade continues; there are so many colorful and odd-looking mushrooms and other fungal forms popping out of the damp ground. We’ve seen many specimens of scaly vase chanterelle, an apricot-colored fungus that reminds us a bit of the tube sponges that grow in coral reefs. Despite its name, it’s not closely related to edible chanterelle mushrooms and can cause severe digestive issues. Look for it growing under conifers. Here’s a profile from mushroom collector Michael Kuo.
We found this eastern bottle-brush grass growing near a stream in the woods at the edge of a stand of mostly white ash. As noted in this profile from the Native Plant Trust, this is a typical woodlands habitat for the species, which is also associated with sugar maples and basswood. Its “bottle-brush” inflorescence will be visible for another month or so.
Common yellowthroats aren’t subtle. You can hear them rustling around the shrubs in the meadow, and, often they’ll emerge from the leaves to inspect you. They make one-syllable scolding sounds that Cornell Lab’s All About Birds site describes as “chucking,” and the black-masked males also have a very loud, distinctive witchety-witchety-witchety song. As Lee Emmons notes in this Outside Story essay, common yellowthroats are one of the many bird species that benefit from brush piles, which offer shelter from hawks and other predators.
Frost’s bolete, also called candy apple bolete, is identifiable by its combination of a white-rimmed red cap, red pores and ropy stem (the stem color is often red, as in this specimen, although this varies, and changes as the mushroom ages). As Timothy J. Baroni notes in Mushrooms of the Northeastern United States and Canada, Frost’s bolete is not a common mushroom most years, but you may find it growing under oaks now through October.
Finally, in a year with alarmingly few insects, we’ve been happy to see a fair number of silver-spotted skippers in the meadows. The caterpillars of this species feed on native legumes such as hog peanut as well as non-native black locust trees, which are common in the region; early settlers valued black locust wood for fencing and other uses, and often planted the trees on their farms. Here’s a profile for silver-spotted skippers from the New Jersey chapter of the North American Butterfly Association.
Our thanks to The Bailey Charitable Foundation and the Frank and Brinna Sands Foundation for helping to support this series.
In this difficult period, many of us find joy in observing local nature. This series, launched in April 2020, shares nature photographs taken in the past seven days, or in the same week in 2020, most within 15 miles of the Northern Woodlands office in Lyme, New Hampshire. We hope you enjoy using this grid as a prompt for your own explorations.
What are you seeing in the woods this week? Share your images with us on Facebook, or submit a special photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.
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