Hairy Solomon’s seal
Solomon’s seals’ most obvious difference from the false Solomon’s seals (maianthemums) is that their flowers hang from the central stem instead of growing from the tip of the stem. I’ve found these sprinkled around the woods, but they definitely don’t grow in thick patches like some of the other wildflowers.
Last spring I noticed that the leaves look quite interesting when they’re unfurling, which actually made them stand out even more from the maianthemums for me.
I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to all the tiny holes in the sand around the seasonal pond area until little flickers of movement inside the holes caught my attention. (For some sense of scale in the photo, what looks like little pebbles are grains of sand.) They were only ever in my peripheral vision; whatever creature I was seeing was apparently very fast and skittish.
Unable to see properly what kept darting back into the holes, I eventually resorted to crouching over ones I’d seen recent movement in with my camera and holding very still… and waiting. I had to have my camera focused on the spot they would emerge before they came out as any tiny movement would cause them to disappear. After a bit of patience (and physical discomfort) I managed to get a couple clear shots of the heads of the creatures poking out of the hole… but they didn’t look like anything I recognized.
I thought they might be the immature form of some insect, but it took me quite a bit of searching before I managed to find something that looked similar… a tiger beetle larva! I don’t know how to tell what species of tiger beetle just from the head of the larvae, but it is quite likely that these were bronzed tiger beetle larvae, because I’d seen quite a few adults of that species in the same spot earlier that spring.
The other interesting thing about looking up pictures of the larvae was that I realized that it was just the head and thorax that is so well developed at this stage, and the rest of the body looks more grub-like. I had thought, looking at them in my pictures, that they looked like little ambush predators with those large mandibles (added to the fact that they didn’t ever seem to come all the way out of their burrows), and it turns out that’s exactly what they are. They pop out and grab passing insects (or other small animals), which is also why their front end is so much more developed at that stage. (The adults are predators too, but they chase down their prey.)
Solomon’s Plume
Maianthemum racemosum aka solomon’s plume is larger and has larger flower clusters than starry false solomon’s seal, but it doesn’t spread as vigorously, so I don’t find it in such dense patches. I find this species particularly fun to photograph, and the flowers aren’t even the main draw for me. I do have one particular photo of the flowers that is one of my favorites, though:
The out of focus leaves in the background are of a different plant of the same species, which is part of what I like about the photo. The first photo I used is also an old favorite of mine, showing the developing flower cluster with wild geraniums in the background. But a lot of the pictures I’ve taken are of the leaves, which have much the same alternating, zigzagging pattern as their relatives, but with an extra wavy edge to the leaves.
It usually blooms slightly out of sync with the other ephemerals, and only has a cluster of buds when the others are at their peak. I still like seeing it mixed in with the wild geraniums, though.
It also has a distinctive speckled pattern on the underripe berries, which it shares with a few other maianthemum species, but is otherwise unique as far as I know. And because they have particularly large flower clusters, they also have larger clusters of berries.
I rarely see the berries fully ripe, so I’m sure they are appreciated by the woodland creatures as well.
Last summer I got to go on a pretty cool hike up north along the Au Sable river. The trail we stopped at turned out to have a lookout area up on the hillside above the river, and I quickly spotted a little island out in the river.
Also at the trailhead was Iargo Springs, which had its own special boardwalk leading down the hill to it. (When we looked it up before going we misread it as Largo Springs.) The springs were flowing out of the hillside into the river and were providing consistent moisture for a lot of different species of mosses and liverworts. There were too many other people around for me to get pictures of the springs themselves (hopefully I can go back sometime when it’s less crowded) but I did get a few pictures of some of the mosses:
There were a few cedars just growing out in the river in shallower spots (I’m assuming anyway), which I thought was interesting. And these ducks were enjoying having some cedar stumps in the river to rest on:
The Au Sable River is far enough north of where I live that the overall ecosystem is very different, so most of the plants I saw were not things I’ve seen much or at all. Some of them I recognized anyway from hearing about them and being intrigued, but some I didn’t recognize at all.
Another thing I got to see for the first time was clubmoss. Clubmosses aren’t actual mosses, but are a group of vascular plants that are from a group distinct from the flowering plants that are particularly familiar (much like ferns or conifers). I haven’t seen any clubmosses in my local area, but on this hike I got to see two very different looking species.
I’m pretty sure this one is blue clubmoss, but regardless, it is for sure one of the species in a genus known as ‘ground cedars’ for their tree-like appearance. If I hadn’t heard of clubmosses, I’d probably have thought they were some sort of evergreen tree seedling, especially since the dominant trees in the forest canopy were pine trees. I might’ve started doubting this when I saw plants with strobili (which is apparently what the spore-producing part of the plant is called);
There was also quite a lot of this clubmoss, growing underneath the ferns and other understory plants.
Here’s another one of the spring ephemerals:
White Baneberry
White baneberry is a larger individual plant than most of the spring ephemerals, but there’s only a couple of them in the woods. This species is also called doll’s eye because the poisonous berries look like doll eyes.
It was absent from the main ephemeral display last year because the spring brought a variety of inclement weather, including a warm period followed by some hard freezes and that seemed to get the better of this plant. Fortunately, after checking on it later, I saw that the plants had berries coming along on them, so they must have bloomed at some point (there are no paths to that spot, so I don’t get back there super often… and it seems even more inaccessible lately since some big branches have come down). There was one year, though, where I managed to get some cool pictures of it with wild geraniums coloring the background… which turned out to be a surprisingly awkward angle to try to get. (Shooting from a standing position was too high an angle, and from crouching was too low…)
On the day we left New Mexico it had snowed overnight, and the mountains were cloaked in clouds when we got up. As the morning went on, the clouds started to dissipate. I went outside for a bit to stretch my legs before getting on the road for most of the day, and decided to point my telephoto lens at the snow covered mountain, and wound up getting what turned out to be some of my favorite photos from the trip. There are bits of cloud still caught up in the mountain in these and snow dusted trees.
Here are a couple more of the woodland spring ephemerals for you:
Maianthemum Stellatum
These are possibly the second most numerous wildflowers in our woods, (though the unobtrusive euonymus flowers are also a possibility) and they tend to spread and grow in thick patches. There seem to be quite a lot of common names for this species, but I don’t like any of them. They’re pretty much all false something, and also overly long. The one I’ve heard most frequently is starry false Solomon’s seal. Sometimes I call it starry maianthemum, though I did just make that up.
Like the other members of its genus the arrangement of the leaves on their slightly zigzag stem give them and interesting pattern to try to capture in my photography.
They also have neat looking berries as they’re ripening up. (So much so that I’ve posted about maianthemum berries specifically before!)
And the flowers are appreciated by a variety of insects. Here’s a longhorn beetle enjoying the maianthemum flowers.
Euonymus obovatus
Euonymus obovatus is a small plant that creeps across the ground, largely hidden from view by the other ephemerals. It is another that I don’t much like the common name- running strawberry bush. (I believe it’s named after another plant called strawberry bush… but still.) I don’t have a lot of good photos of this one since it tends to hide in the shadows, but it is an interesting looking little plant. it was about the last of the ephemerals I managed to identify so I don’t know a lot about this one either.
The past year turned out to be a good one for getting wasp photos for me, particularly this past August. When the first of the goldenrod started to bloom these plants turned into magnets for pollinators of all sorts, but I particularly noticed a lot of wasps, not just in numbers of individuals, but in diversity of species as well.
Before that, wasps had been congregating on the spotted horse mint / spotted bee balm (both common names for monarda punctata) in the pollinator garden by the house. I was having fun seeing how many different kinds I could spot as well as just appreciating their many different shapes and colors… but as I realized going through them later, even some very similar looking ones turned out to be different species.
I wanted to show off in this post some of the wasp variety I’ve been able to photograph through the years, though of course what I’ve managed to photograph is just a tiny sampling of what exists (there are some truly wild looking wasps out there, of which I’ve managed to photograph only a few). Also some of these photos are ones I’m more satisfied with than others.
The northern paper wasp (polistes fuscatus) has a significant amount of variety packed into one species. Their varied colors and markings make them fun subjects, plus I was starting to notice what seemed to be the same individuals hanging out on the same flower patches each day when I was doing really regular wasp walks.
Many species of solitary wasps, like this rusty spider wasp, specialize in hunting a specific type of prey that they will cache in a nest for their offspring. In the case of spider wasps, they specialize (as their name implies) in hunting spiders. I noticed one of these wasps hanging around the entrance to the garage one day, and then she disappeared into the garage for a while and I lost track of her, only to later spot her dragging a huge spider out!
I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of wasps I can find this year!
From a distance the green algae growing in the wet pondish area last spring looked kind of foamy and not very interesting, but through the macro lens it took on an entirely different character and I could see that the ‘foam’ was made up of tiny algae filaments trapping lots of little air bubbles. While I was taking pictures of the algae I spotted a tiny springtail just walking over the water which I made sure to get in some photos as well. It turned out I got a couple more springtails in my photos that I didn’t see at the time (it was kind of hard to see what I was doing much of the time anyway; I was leaning out over the water to reach the algae but I couldn’t really lean far enough to look through the viewfinder properly most of the time). I thought the results were super interesting looking, and I ended up returning to it to take more photos.
In early spring when trees are just starting to leaf out, a few tree species have leaf buds that look quite a bit like flowers. Possibly the most dramatic example of this I’ve seen are the hickory trees (and the shagbarks in particular). Their buds can be quite large, which adds to the effect.
Ironically, the actual flowers of hickory trees don’t look nearly as showy as these buds; they have catkins and tiny, not very noticeable female flowers (which I haven’t seen since they’re high up in mature trees).
I first noticed this a few years ago now, but it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I was able to start getting some decent pictures. (It helps to have some young saplings that are easier to reach…)
The young, just unfurling leaves look pretty interesting too, with a layer of fur and tiny beads of what I think might be some sort of sap or resin.
There’s always so much out there to discover at each time of year and things seem to happen especially quickly in the spring. You have to keep an eye out or you’ll miss it!