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:
I was fairly surprised to spot some sphagnum moss (aka peat moss) growing near the river. This was the first time I’d seen any in the wild (at least since learning anything about mosses). I’d always thought sphagnum mosses were particularly distinctive looking mosses, and it turns out that is presumably because they are a group of mosses with no close relatives (there are a couple of semi closely related species, but otherwise they’re pretty much off on their own branch of the moss family tree).Unfortunately I didn’t get the best photos, but this was another one that surprised me; I didn’t think neckera moss was found this far south in Michigan, but this might have been close to the edge of its range for Michigan. There was not a lot there, just a small tuft on a tree.This probably looks like a moss, but it is actually a type of liverwort (probably handsome woolywort). Liverworts are non-vascular plants like mosses but are considered their own group. Some of them look relatively different from mosses (thalloid liverworts), but a lot of them I would probably just assume to be mosses if I didn’t happen to recognize them. A lot of the differences between mosses and liverworts are fairly technical and it may be easier to just recognize a lot of them individually.This is likely pincushion moss (or a close relative).
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.
This sweetfern is a good example of a plant with very different habitat requirements than the habitat I live in. I saw quite a bit of it, especially in the higher sandier areas of the trail. It likes dry sandy soils and tends to grow in pine forests. It was quite easy to identify since it has no particularly close relatives (also it isn’t actually a fern, despite the name).Bracken ferns are super common in mid and northern Michigan generally (these I’ve definitely seen before) and this trail had large amounts of them carpeting the understory.Like other ferns I’ve encountered, the bracken ferns had cool patterns in their leaf veins and leaf shape.Bracken fern unfurling
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);
The leaves really do look very cedar-like, though.
There was also quite a lot of this clubmoss, growing underneath the ferns and other understory plants.
This one, stag’s horn clubmoss, looks quite different from the blue clubmoss, but they’re not too distantly related. If they had had strobili on them at the time I found them that would have made for a slightly stronger resemblance, but they did not. There was also not nearly as much of this kind, and I very easily could have walked right by it without noticing (actually, I did the first time, I spotted this on the way back).
This was one I didn’t recognize at all when I first saw it, but it was quite distinctive looking so it wasn’t hard to identify. It is called pipsissewa and it is a type of wintergreen. This one managed to hold on to its seed pods for an especially long time, which also helped with identification.There was a fair amount of lichens around where we were hiking, but this reindeer lichen particularly stood out as being something I don’t see closer to home.
