This week in the woods, the starflower is the star. One of the most common spring bloomers in northeastern woodlands and tolerant of shade, the wildflower is blossoming all over the floors of our moist hardwood, mixed, and coniferous forests, often in colonies formed by way of creeping rhizomes.
Cucumber root, another low-growing perennial, shares similar habitat and similar foliage (especially before it puts on its second “storey” of leaves). You can distinguish it from starflowers by leaf venation (pinnate for starflowers, parallel for cucumber root) and, when present, the starkly different flowers. Greenish or yellow cucumber root flowers nod below the top leaf whorl and have prominent backward-bending, petal-like segments. The purple berry that follows the flower in the fall is inedible, and the crisp white root can be dug up and eaten at this time of year, but such a practice is discouraged today because of the plant’s scarcity.
On the other hand, Canada mayflower produces an edible berry in the fall and is very common. Abundance at a particular site suggests poor soils, with the adaptive, rhizome-spreading herb occupying gaps where more sensitive plants cannot live.
While chokecherry might not impress viewers with its shrubby size, it will still dazzle with its showy white flowers – around a hundred of them per cluster. Now in bloom, this tree attracts numerous native pollinators, like this hawthorn mining bee.
Ann Little photographed this otherworldly-seeming crane fly among the moss and leaf litter. The lollypop-looking protrusions below the fly’s wings are modified hind wings called halteres, which Rachel Sargent Mirus wrote an Outside Story article about in 2021. These organs oscillate rapidly during flight and provide the insect with sensory information to help them stabilize and recalibrate their trajectory. (Given crane flies’ sporadic, awkward flying, it might not seem like the halteres do much good.)
One of the Upper Valley’s most common warblers, the chestnut-sided warbler breeds here in the summer and sings its pleased pleased pleased to meetcha song from brushy regrowth. In her 2023 Outside Story essay on the bird, Susan Shea writes, “Unlike many warblers, which prefer mature forest, chestnut-sided warblers thrive in early-successional habitat in rural areas – overgrown fields, regenerating deciduous forest, and woodland edges.” Their population benefited from the early twentieth-century reversion of abandoned farm fields to secondary forest, but these forests’ maturation, habitat loss, building strikes, pesticides, and climate change have caused their numbers to decline again in the past 60 years.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.