Month: February 2024

Tiny Felt Leaves

One spring I was fascinated by these tiny, just-emerged oak leaves I found on the many oak saplings along the edge of the woods. To me they looked like tiny felt crafts. They were actually tiny enough to be tricky to photograph.

Bright red, fuzzy leaves don’t seem to be a characteristic of any specific oak species; they could have to do with environmental conditions, but I wasn’t able to find much information about it. Plus, I don’t know if what I found was talking about leaves that were as tiny as the ones I found. They certainly grew out of their fuzzy red stage extremely quickly.

These leaves are only a couple days older than the others and still quite fuzzy but they only have a hint of the red at the edges of the leaves.

The undersides of a couple leaves just emerging from the bud.
A detail crop of one of the leaves.
A wider view of the emerging leaves.

I was able to spot bright red leaves like this again this past spring so I do know it wasn’t just a one-year oddity. I’m pretty sure at least some of these are burr oak, but it’s hard to tell for sure what they all were at this stage and there may have been multiple species with leaves like this. (I’m pretty sure these are all from the white oak group, though.) I’m still not quite sure yet how common this might be, but I could see it being easy to overlook, as tiny as the leaves are and if they’re on mature trees they’d be up well out of sight.

Lichens in New Mexico (Part 2)

After doing part one of this post I started looking into lichen identification a little bit. (Not even intentionally, really; I just got sidetracked while looking up something else.) I’ve started to have a general idea of some of the lichens I’ve seen around, but I haven’t gotten too far yet. One of the lichens I was able to most clearly figure out was one I had been saving for the second part, because it was distinctive and I took quite a few pictures of it.

This is a type of lichen that was everywhere up in the mountains (or all over the trees, anyway). I’m pretty sure this is a type of beard lichen (usnea genus, probably usnea hirta aka bristly beard lichen). I definitely don’t have this kind at home, so I was pretty intrigued by them even though I could see that they were quite common in the mountains.
While I was in New Mexico I couldn’t help thinking of these ones as golf tee lichens since that’s what they look like to me. Now that I’ve started looking things up somewhat, it seems to be a species of cladonia, which, depending on which species, means the common name may be ‘trumpet lichen’ or ‘pixie cup’ (or something similar). Sadly, none of them appear to be named after golf tees. (Also, cladonia is a pretty big genus and also has lichens that don’t really look like this at all.)
This is a branch covered in the furry looking beard lichens. it also has a bit of some other type of lichen on it.
Even the tree trunks had a lot of lichen growing on them.
Lichens growing in a patch of moss. These are also a cladonia species.
This type of lichen was pretty common in the mountains and it could get huge. I saw one that had spread out over a rock in a roughly circular patch that was probably more than a foot in diameter (though it wasn’t laying flat because the rock wasn’t flat, which makes it a little hard to estimate). Some patches within the circle had been scraped away, but the lichen was growing back into them.
I think this photo does a nice job of showing off the interesting structure of the beard lichens.
This lichen was growing on a shiny rock in the gorge. There were lichens growing in all sorts of interesting places, too.
Lichen draped trees in the mountains.
This is an oddly shaped patch of lichen that caught my eye. It looks like part of it probably broke off so what was left is a bit of an unusual shape.
This was some of the longest beard lichen I encountered in New Mexico.