This week in the woods, this dark fishing spider fell out of a wood pile and onto a piece of target-practice paper. Our area’s other fishing spider species appear near permanent bodies of water, as their name implies, but dark fishing spiders inhabit drier woodland environments. As the weather cools, they seek out covered places to hibernate, like crevices in bark and our homes. If you encounter one in your basement or bathtub, don’t be disturbed by its size. The females can have legspans of up to three inches, but they don’t harm humans – only their prey and male mates, which they eat upon copulating. For more on fishing spiders, which are among the hairiest of spiders, walk and even sail on water, and can remain submerged for up to a half hour in a “glistening shroud of air,” see Declan McCabe’s Outside Story article from 2020.
This white snakeroot leaf displays a leaf mine, most likely left by a white snakeroot leaf miner. Perhaps 10,000 insects are characterized as leaf miners – primarily moth species, but also sawfly and fly species, as well as some beetles. Regardless of their taxonomical group, leaf miners have a common defining behavior: in their larval stage they shelter in and feed between leaves’ top and bottom epidermal layers, leaving this kind of translucent tunnel. Leaf miner species may have vastly different appearances from one another as adults, but the common constraints of their environments shape their larvae to look highly similar: flattened and seemingly legless, with minimal eyes or antennae and wedge-shaped heads. This similarity in appearance on top of their miniscule size makes identification with the naked eye difficult. However, the unique “signatures” of their mines, the pattern of their waste material (or frass), and the host plant species can help you determine the species. “There are leaf miner species that feed within almost every kind of leaf,” writes Virginia Barlow in the Summer 2006 issue of Northern Woodlands, “even on plants with milky sap or that are poisonous to other animals,” such as white snakeroot in this case. Because leaf miner species tend to be host-specific and so many species exist, finding a leaf miner on an uncommon plant means good odds that you’ve encountered an undescribed (or even new) species. Leaf miners prefer mature leaves, so the period between mid-summer and now makes for a good time to seek them out. (For more on the subject, check out Charley Eiseman’s ever-growing ebook Leafminers of North America, now well over 2,000 pages.)
As insects dwindle, nutritious fruit ripens for omnivorous migrant birds. The gray catbird pictured here enjoying silky dogwood drupes will likely have departed our area by the end of the month, but the yellow-rumped warbler might just stick around. Of all warblers, only the yellow-rumped can digest the waxes found on bayberry, wax myrtle, and juniper fruits. Its generalist tendencies allow it to overwinter – occasionally – in Vermont and New Hampshire and even as far north as Newfoundland. The bright yellow sides we observed in the spring have faded now that the bird has transitioned to its non-breeding plumage. But its “butterbutt” remains, and if you see one flaunting its stuff on a bare twig in the cold months to come, you might think of Bryan Pfeiffer’s description of it from the Winter 2013 issue: “an aster in winter, sun through the clouds… a force of nature.”
A species complex common in autumn, oyster mushrooms put out fruiting bodies in fragrant clusters on deciduous trees’ stumps and trunks. Such fungi slip filaments between cell walls, liquefy the wood, and absorb sugars and nutrients from the resulting soup in order to expand their mycelial networks; the vital process cycles nutrients and energy through the forest, making them available for other organisms and driving decay. “When fungi feed,” writes David George Haskell in The Forest Unseen, “they push their homes deeper into the sea of oblivion. Dead twigs are therefore sinking islands of habitat, and fungi must continually send out progeny to seek new islands. It is this imperative that brings the fungi into our sensory world.” For fleeting periods, most often after rain, we see reproductive structures like these plump caps, but the sprawling underground networks we don’t see far exceed them in mass and volume.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.