This week in the woods, a black-throated green warbler, a bird more often high up in the forest canopy, deigned to visit us in the understory for a moment and sing its fitting song: I’m so pretty just look at me. We’ll have this neotropical migrant with us all summer.
Foam flower appears most often under deciduous trees in northern hardwood forests, like the sugar maple stand where we found this feathery, flowering specimen, spreading out into a colony in Corinth, Vermont. Nearby, a jack-in-the-pulpit waited for its primary pollinators, fungus gnats and flies. Its stripey, hooded spathe (the pulpit) covered its flower-bearing spadix (Jack). As Meghan McCarthy McPhaul shares in her 2016 Outside Story article, these familiar wildflowers can change between male and female year to year, depending on how much energy it has stored in an underground stem called a corm; the pollen males produce requires much less energy than the fruit females produce. Invasive garlic mustard outcompetes huge swathes of these wildflowers.
Blossoming painted trillium also decorates trailsides in the Upper Valley this week. Its pink streaks supposedly lead pollinators through its petals’ wash of white and into the flower.
Despite the annoyance that hobblebush’s common name indicates, the understory viburnum rewards us with perky heart-shaped leaves and a beautiful inflorescence that attracts numerous pollinators. The larger, most attractive outer-ring white flowers are sterile and all for show; only the smaller internal greenish waxy flowers have stamens and pistils and are fertile. With early leafout to take advantage of the light making its way through otherwise leafless canopy, hobblebush risks frost damage in the spring but maintains a low respiration rate and produces antifreeze agents in its leaves; these adaptations reduce its freezing point to 23 degrees, making it one of the most cold-tolerant woody plants.
Bill McCarthy photographed this beaver one morning last week in Franconia, New Hampshire, in an area not particularly close to any swimmable bodies of water. We venture that this animal is a second-year dispersing from its natal lodge, a process meant to make room for new kits at birthing time. Dispersing young beavers leave home in the spring and sometimes spend months seeking mates and their own territory, often seeming lost and out of place when we encounter them. (Mary Holland has more on this process on her Naturally Curious blog.)
Thick, firm jelly surrounds masses of spotted salamander eggs, protecting them from drying up and from predation. Often also laid on submerged vegetation in the same vernal pools (and photographed here by Ann Little), masses of wood frog eggs appear much lumpier, as they lack the additional protective gel layer. You can see the membranes of the individual salamander eggs within the mass’s gel, but the contours of each individual frog egg make up the edge of their mass. For more on telling apart amphibian eggs, see this article illustrated by Nicholas Bezio from our Spring 2023 issue.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.
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