This week in the woods, we saw what might be some of the year’s last blooming plants, poisonous plants, and a glut of caterpillars, all in Vershire, Vermont. A geranium species native to the Northeast but considered an invasive in the West, herb Robert has reseeded and put out its tiny five-petaled flowers repeatedly from early spring into the autumn. The fern-like, low-growing biennial herb does well in shade and on rocky ground, and its musky, skunky scent has earned it the nickname “stinky Bob.”
White snakeroot flowers from mid-July to mid-September, and its dense, flat-topped clusters of white blossoms showed signs of fading by the time we came across large swaths of it in a mixed hardwood forest. Any agricultural activity on the ridgetop had ceased at least a half century ago, but the perennial contains the toxin tremetol, which, when eaten by cows, can contaminate meat and milk and sicken humans who consume them.
Like snakeroot, every part of American pokeweed, from roots to stems and leaves, contains compounds toxic to humans, pets, and livestock. The glossy, succulent, grape-like berries present now may have such brilliant coloration in order to attract the migratory bird species resistant to the toxins, otherwise unfamiliar with local food sources, and dependent on visual cues for finding food.
The fruits of yet another famously poisonous plant decorate woodland edges and pastures: milkweed pods. According to naturalist Mary Holland, only 2–4 percent of common milkweed flowers (from up to several hundred per plant) produce mature pods.
The milkweed tussock moth caterpillars can defoliate individual milkweed plants and, when they irrupt, even entire patches. According to David L. Wagner’s Caterpillars of Eastern North America, they don’t mind eating older, sometimes even yellowing foliage, as opposed to monarch caterpillars, which prefer younger, vigorously growing shoots. Moth and butterfly caterpillars have a near-exclusive focus on eating leaves and turning them into flesh, sometimes consuming thousands of times their body weight and increasing that body weight thousands of times in turn. In most forests, caterpillars consume more leaves than all other herbivores combined.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.