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.
SpringtailClose up of the springtail
This springtail only appeared in one photo and, amazingly, in perfect focus (3rd photo is the uncropped version)
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.
Although it mostly wasn’t super cold while I was in New Mexico, there were still some interesting ice formations to be found in the mountains, particularly around streams. This was partly because it was colder the higher in the mountains you got, but also because the temperature differences between day and night were more extreme there.
This is what happens when a waterfall freezes (partially, anyway). Though you can’t really see it in a still photo, there was water flowing a bit behind this wall of ice.This is the center of the waterfall in the previous photo. It was still flowing through the center, but there was a chunk of ice in the middle of the flowing part that looked a bit like an explosion of ice, which was causing the liquid water to splash around pretty wildly. It’s kind of hard to tell in this photo what water is frozen and what water is just in active motion.This one’s a close up of the wall of ice in the first photo.I think this picture has interesting contrast with the smooth, rounded ice and frothy bubbles.More ice and bubbles.These icicle-like formations were on the underside of a log over a churned up bit of river. I’m guessing they formed from the spray of the river running to the bottom of the log and freezing before they could drip back down.I found these tiny ice formations on twigs after climbing up the same rock where I also found some of the lichens in my lichen post. I was pretty excited to find these, since I haven’t seen any ice formations quite like this at home. When I found these, and for quite a while afterwards, I wondered what the conditions were that made it possible for these to form. Recently, I stumbled across something that may be an explanation.Certain ice formations occur due to specific interactions with plants or fungi. I recently learned that there are a few different plant species that create ice formations when their sap freezes and bursts out of the sides of the stem, which is actually sort of what appears to be happening in this picture in particular… But on the other hand I wasn’t able to find information about any of these plants being in New Mexico. It would help if I could see this spot during the summer.Another angle of the tiny ice formation.A close up of the first ice formation.
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.
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.
I took a bunch of pictures of a variety of different lichens while we were in New Mexico. When I went through them to make a post about lichens I found it difficult to narrow them down to a reasonable number of photos for a post, which was why I decided to split it up. I’ve noticed I take a lot of lichen photos when I travel, which is partly because the lichens where I live are mostly very tiny and tricky to photograph well, but also New Mexico seemed like a good place for lichens.
I found this interesting looking lichen up in the mountains.A lichen I found near the gorge.Lichens like this one were mostly high in the trees, but occasionally I would find them on fallen branches, or just low hanging branches.I found this lichen when I climbed up a rocky outcrop in the mountains, along with some other lichens and tiny ice formations.A couple of different types of lichens growing next to each other.This photo shows where the previous two lichens were growing: on a small rock on the forest floor in the mountains.I found this lichen on a low hanging branch. It was actually quite large; maybe about the size of my hand.Another lichen I found on the rock outcrop.Tiny lichens I found near the gorge.Another lichen I found on the rock outcrop.This one is a cool mix of lichens mostly covering the stone surface.
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.
Last November I went on a trip to New Mexico to visit some family and it was as beautiful there as I was assured it would be. While I was there I did quite a bit of hiking around in different areas. There were two general areas, that were each their own separate ecosystems, that I visited. One of these was the mountains, and the other was the canyon, which was in a lower (though low is relative) desert area. Both were the sort of landscapes that would make going there (as a photographer) and not doing some landscape photography seem… kind of wrong. I hadn’t really done a ton of landscape photography before, but I’m pretty happy with some of the landscape type photos I took on the trip.
Mountains
The mountains were mostly covered with evergreen forest, interspersed with rocky outcrops and cliffs as well as rivers flowing down to the land below. Because of the season we went, there were some interesting ice formations around the rivers.
A ponderosa pine trunk in the foreground standing out against snowy evergreens. This was taken on the day we left; there had been a snowfall the night before, so everything was covered in snow, but higher in the mountains there was snow the whole time we were there.This was a particularly rocky area we went through on the way out.Another mountain scene with some sort of birches.Rock formations like this one were pretty common in the mountains.
Canyon
The canyon we visited was the Rio Grande Gorge. I found a trail that went from the rim of the canyon down to the river, which we did on our last day there. The canyon area had lots of little shrubby looking trees (I think they were mostly just slow growing and sometimes stunted from the conditions they were growing in). I know some of the trees there were junipers, ponderosa pines, and pinion pines. It wasn’t really forested, though, and there were quite a few smaller bushy and herbaceous plants that I wasn’t familiar with (although I’m pretty certain a significant amount of it was sagebrush).
The Rio Grande Gorge from the bridge across the gorge.A large boulder from one of the cliffs in the Rio Grande.This was the trail we took into the gorge. You can see the switchbacks in the trail in this photo.Another picture of the gorge from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge.The gorge from within, about halfway down the cliff.
Of course, I took more than just landscape photos on the trip; I actually noticed I was switching lenses and settings quite a bit more regularly than I usually do since I was trying to photograph such a wide variety of subjects. In coming posts I’ll share more of the other kinds of pictures I was taking.
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.
