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.
I thought the leaves on this sapling were particularly pretty with the maroon color between the leaflet midribs.This one is a close up (crop) of the previous picture.
Crab spiders like this one usually hang out on (or in) flowers, so it was interesting to see this one on a freshly opened hickory bud.The outside of the bud is fuzzy and feels kind of silky if you touch it.
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!
Towards the end of May (roughly) is when all the spring ephemerals in the woods flower each year. It is an impressive display, but it is fairly brief. (You could say it lives up to the name ephemeral, I suppose.) I wanted to make a post about it, but with multiple years worth of photos, it was turning out fairly long, so I decided to make it a little series instead, and just spotlight one or two of the different species I’ve observed per post.
Wild Geranium
Wild geraniums are the most numerous of the spring ephemerals in our woods, which is part of their charm; it would be hard not to be impressed by the way they quite literally carpet large areas of the woods. I’ve tried many times over the years to capture a good sense of this in my photos, but although I’ve made some improvements and gotten some good photos, I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing will quite compare to seeing it in person. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to do the best I can with it.
Like quite a few native wildflowers, wild geraniums have at least one specialist pollinator: the cranesbill miner bee (cranesbill is another name for the wild geranium). Being specialist pollinators means that these bees will only use wild geranium pollen for feeding their offspring, though the adults may visit other flowers for nectar.
This is probably a cranesbill miner bee (I am at least certain that this is some type of miner bee), but miner bees can be very difficult to identify to the species.Of course wild geraniums also provide nectar and pollen to a variety of other non-specialized pollinators too, like this agapostemon (sweat) bee.
This certainly won’t be the last you see of the wild geraniums in this series; they show up alongside the other ephemerals in many of their photos, too.
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.
Here is a series of photos I took shortly before I went to New Mexico of a bluebird doing acrobatics to reach some dogwood berries. This series is definitely an improvement over the last time I tried to photograph a bird eating dogwood berries (which was shortly after I got the telephoto lens and was still getting a feel for it). Though all these photos are cropped at least a little, I think it’s cool to be able to see some of the poses of a bird foraging for berries since they usually move a bit too fast to be able to see what they’re doing.
There are two different species of maianthemum that have been in the woods since I moved here (recently a third species has shown up, but that’s a story for later). Maianthemums (a genus also commonly known as false solomon’s seal) have a lot of interesting facets, but one thing I find particularly cool is their semi-ripe berries. When ripe, they’re small, red, and not too distinctive looking. But when they’re still ripening, one of the species here has spotted berries (maianthemum racemosum, also known as Solomon’s plume), and the other species has striped berries (maianthemum stellatum, also known as starry false solomon’s seal).
Maianthemum racemosum berries. This species has larger clusters of berries (and flowers, in the spring).Maianthemum stellatum berries
One time, while walking in the woods, I found this; these are the fully ripe berries of Solomon’s plume (possibly even a bit overripe, but at least a bit shriveled), and they do look quite cool dried up like this. I think most of the time the berries get eaten before they get to this stage, and it seems especially unusual to get to this stage with the full cluster intact like this.
One evening recently while I was in the woods, I noticed some spiderwebs being backlit by the setting sun. As it turns out, my newer lens works great for spiderwebs, and after taking a couple fairly standard head-on pictures, I started experimenting with the angle. I didn’t have very long to work with this scene, though, because the sun was only illuminating each web for a few minutes (there were three webs that I found). I would have enjoyed more time with this subject, but I was happy with this photo.
A harvestman on elderflowers. This one had especially interesting markings.
I am quite fond of harvestmen (aka daddy long legs). I’m not exactly sure why I like them so much; the best way I’ve managed to describe it is that they just seem like peaceful little forest spirits… although they’re not found only in the woods, but they do seem particularly plentiful there. So, I suppose, much like the woods, they are a calming presence. Getting good photos of them, though, is a bit tricky. It isn’t that they are uncooperative (they’re actually probably more cooperative than most creatures), but super close up pictures of them tend to look pretty awkward with their legs mostly not in the frame, and they like to hang out in fairly dim places, making it hard for their colors and markings to be visible. I am now finally building up a small collection of harvestman photos that I like.
A harvestman on a mossy patch on a fallen tree
Despite being pretty common, easy to find creatures, not many people seem to know what harvestmen are; they are often called spiders, but, though they are arachnids, they belong to their own group. (They’re actually thought to be more closely related to scorpions.) The name ‘harvestmen’ refers to the order opiliones, which is a pretty general category. (For example, butterflies and moths are an order, and beetles are another order. And so are spiders.) So, not surprisingly, there are lots of different kinds of harvestmen. They come in many different sizes, shapes, and colors and have a variety of diets and habits. The harvestmen in these photos are only a tiny fraction of their variety.
Harvestman on a black raspberry leaf
Although harvestmen look similar to spiders, they don’t have two distinctly separate body segments as spiders do. They also don’t produce silk or venom. Instead of venom carrying fangs, they have a pair of tiny pincer like claws. (I’ve actually seen them carrying things with these claws, though I haven’t gotten a good look at the claws themselves as they’re tucked under the harvestman’s body.) They also use their second pair of legs (from front) as feelers and I’d noticed them probing around with them (and also that that pair of legs is often extra long) before I was able to find information about it.
Harvestman on a hydrangea flower clusterHarvestman on a mossy fallen tree.
I’m always happy to see these little guys even if I don’t end up taking pictures of them, but I do hope I’m able to get better at photographing them.
This spring while out in the woods I noticed a blue jay watching me from a branch nearby. The jay’s idle curiosity gave me a generous opportunity to get some photos (I think I even had to switch lenses). I wouldn’t be surprised if this particular bird recognized me as a regular visitor to the woods.
The blue jay facing away from the camera, but still watching me.The front view of the jay
There are a couple of fairly common woodland butterflies that I usually start to see right around this time of year: the comma butterfly and the mourning cloak butterfly. It should be a bit of a toss-up which I see first since they start to appear at roughly the same time. In practice, it seems like I usually spot the mourning cloak first. This year was no exception to that; I spotted my first mourning cloak on the 21st (I didn’t have my camera with me at the time, though), and I haven’t spotted a comma yet.
The two species are relatively closely related and have a similar strategy that allows them to be present super early in the spring; both overwinter as adults and can feed on tree sap so they aren’t dependent on flowers blooming to be active.
This mourning cloak butterfly was basking in a patch of sunshine in the woods which might be part of why I was able to creep up on it. Their distinctive colors and markings make them pretty unmistakable.This comma butterfly is perched on one of its host plants (plants their caterpillars develop on), willow.
