Exploring Bent of the River

This morning I decided to go on an adventure in a brand new woods (new to me, that is). Off I went to the Bent of the River Audubon sanctuary!

This place turned out to be basically wonderful. It had deep woods with delightful streams and pools, and wide meadows dotted with huge trees:

And a long trail following the river that gives the sanctuary its name:

The most amazing thing to me, though, was how obviously well cared-for this place is. I saw no trash at all on the whole 2+ miles of trails I walked. None. Every other park I go to around here always has at least the occasional (sometimes more than that) beer can, fishing line, cigarette butt, etc., so this seemed pretty crazy by comparison. I also didn't see any other people on the trails. I'm sure the fact that Bent of the River doesn't allow dogs, bikes, or fishing is related to all this. In any case, I loved it. Except for the well-groomed trails and occasional nesting box, this place really felt like it was more about nature than it was about people. I felt totally comfortable ambling along these trails (and not at all dorky with my binoculars and camera), and I was happy to pay the suggested $5 trail fee to get to hang out here.

And as for my actual woods walk, there was plenty to see! Now that the canopy has entirely leafed out, I heard a lot more birds than I saw, but that just meant I got to work on identifying by ear. (Normally I take pictures of things I don't recognize to figure out IDs later, and today I was doing a lot of sound recording for the same reason.)

Although the birds stayed out of camera range, several other creatures did come close. A few Little Wood Satyr butterflies were chasing each other through the woods and fields, and one let me creep up on it for a picture:

(I love those orange antennae.)

A dark fishfly (genus Nigronia) fluttered around on oversized wings:

And this Ebony Jewelwing damselfly was definitely jewel-like in the light-dappled forest:

At one point, I turned around to face where I had just been walking, and I was surprised to find that an Eastern Garter Snake had suddenly appeared a few feet away from me and directly in my path:

Sneaky snake! Oo, look at your pretty red and black tongue:

I looked away to check my camera's settings, and when I looked back up the snake had completely disappeared again. I think this snake might have some ninja skills.

I had been hoping to see Pink Lady's Slippers in bloom in these woods, but all I managed to find were several large flower-less plants:

Oh well, maybe these plants will have flowers next year.

The Mountain Laurel was just opening its fancy flowers:

These flowers are gorgeous, but I also really like the way these buds look before they open, like little shooting stars lighting up the woods:

Continuing the lighting theme, these (I think) Varnish Shelf Fungi (Ganoderma tsugae) were like weirdly-shaped lanterns:

In the fields, huge Cow Parsnip plants were opening their big flower-umbrellas a few feet above the ground:

It was definitely a good morning, and if I lived closer to this place it would become one of my frequent haunts. And really, any nature walk gets bonus awesome points when it ends with a field of horses:

:)

Another Peeper, and a Vole Reaches Its End

Every once in a while, I'll see a really cool animal, something that I almost never see, and then all of a sudden it feels like I'm seeing them everywhere. This happened to me earlier this year with owls (OMG, owls), and now apparently it's the Spring Peepers' turn. Up until last week, I'd never seen a peeper outside of their spring mating season -- as far as I knew, they might've stayed hidden the rest of the year. Then there was the peeper on my porch last week, and now this morning, on my walk through Naugatuck State Forest, I saw this fellow:

Peepers are generally nocturnal, but this one seems to have missed that memo. It was lounging casually on its leaf, its eyes wide open and its little throat fluttering. Peepers can have some variation in color, and I love the gray-brown tones on this little guy. (We do have Gray Tree Frogs in Connecticut, but this is not one -- the criss-cross pattern on this frog's back, together with its very small size, identifies it as a Spring Peeper.) Although the frog was clearly awake, maybe it was a little drowsy, because it sat perfectly still and let me walk all around it to get a closer picture.

Really, frogs are some of my favorite animals -- tree frogs especially -- and I cannot imagine a more darling little creature.

On a very different note, here's a lesson from today's walk: nature isn't always happy. On one of the paths through the woods, I found a small furry creature -- something I'd never seen before -- lying in the dirt. It was breathing and moving its legs weakly, but it was pretty clear that this little guy wasn't going to be around much longer. I don't usually like to take pictures of animals in distress, but how often am I going to get the chance to see one of these secretive creatures? There's nothing gruesome here, it's just a little sad.

After some research, I'm pretty sure this is (was) a Woodland Vole (also called a Pine Vole, Microtus pinetorum). It's got a short tail, and the small eyes and ears of a creature who spends much of its time underground. This animal is only supposed to come out of its burrows to forage on the ground at night, so I can only assume that this individual was sick, or injured by a predator, or both.

In any case, I left the little guy alone, because I didn't know what else to do. I do hope a predator came by after I left to finish the job, but I didn't stop by again to check. It was very interesting to see a vole, but I wish it could have happened under nicer circumstances.

So that's the sad part of this post. I did see some other (and very much alive) creatures on my walk, like this gorgeous male Eastern Pondhawk dragonfly:

And I saw some new flowers as well. This is (I believe) Round-headed Bush-clover (Lespedeza capitata):

The best guess I have for this next plant is that it's Lance-leaved Goldenrod (Euthamia graminifolia), albeit with much fewer flowers than I'm used to seeing on a goldenrod -- my botanically-inclined readers should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, though:

And finally, here's something I've never seen before -- a swelling seedpod on a Pink Lady's Slipper:

I'm not used to thinking of orchids as bearing seeds, but bear them they do. Of course, of the many, many seeds this seedpod will produce, only a few will find exactly the right conditions (and the right fungus... orchids are so interesting/weird) to grow into new plants.

It seems strangely fitting to end this post with a picture of seeds-in-production. I guess today I encountered some extremes -- birth and death.... It's all one big package.

Back in Connecticut, with a new toy

I'm back! For a little while, anyway -- we're leaving again on Friday for an Exciting Adventure Oversees.... Look for potential blog posts about that later!

For now, though, I'm back to visiting my normal Connecticut haunts for a couple of days, and also playing around with the new camera I just got as a gift. (Thanks, Grandpa!) It's an SLR digital camera, and much more high-tech than the pocket-sized point-and-shoot variety I've been using for the past few years, which means that I've got some major learning to do! For example, I now have an actual zoom lens, so I don't have to take pictures through my binoculars anymore... what a crazy concept! I'm sticking with as many automatic settings as possible for now, and I'm having fun experimenting and getting the hang of the new machine. (And experimenting means varying picture quality, so bear with me during my learning phase.)

So I took the new camera out to the Naugatuck State Forest this morning to check on the plants and animals there. As I expected, everything has definitely changed in the 13 days since I was last there, not least in the flowers that are blooming.

The Pink Lady's Slippers are fully open and even starting to look a little worn. I only saw a few of these plants today, but I was very happy to find them.

The Mayapple blossoms are open and gorgeous, and I saw one plant that has already started to set fruit. Mayapple fruit is one of those wild foods that I've always wanted to try but never been able to -- when I was growing up in western New York, we had Mayapple plants everywhere, but the fruit always mysteriously disappeared before it ripened. From what I hear, though, it's sweet and delicious, so I'm going to watch these plants carefully as the season progresses and see if I can't finally get a taste.

These white-flowered plants were growing in a patch along one portion of the path, and when I bruised a leaf it smelled faintly like anise (i.e. licorice). My best guess is that this is Aniseroot (Osmorhiza longistylis), a native plant. It could also be Sweet Cicely, another anise-smelling plant introduced from Europe, but these flowers and leaves seem to match the descriptions for Aniseroot more closely, so I'll go with that.

This is Morrow's Honeysuckle, another invasive (non-native) species, and I'm deeply conflicted about it. I have such great nostalgia for this honeysuckle, since I spent my childhood pinching off its flower ends and sipping the nectar, which is delicious. But it's a "bad" plant, banned in Connecticut. Delicious... bad... gah, so confused!

There were a bunch of small animals out and about today as well, giving me a chance to practice with the camera some more.

The zoom lens was perfect for letting me get really "close" to this Bullfrog without startling it into the lake. (These guys are so awesome.)

Same with this American Painted Lady -- I love the detail of the shimmery scales on this creature's wings.

This cute little toad (either American or Fowler's, I'm not sure which) hopped across my path and showed me his (or her) bright yellow hand. I don't think I've ever noticed this feature on toads before, and it made a nice spot of color on the brown/gray forest floor.

I also saw a couple of really pretty damselflies, and even after a good bit of research I still have no idea what species they are:

As a side note, I was a crazy person today and decided to go to the woods at an insane hour in the morning, much earlier than I usually get up. Mostly, I wanted to test the idea that birdwatching is best done in the time just after sunrise. My conclusion: not really. I did hear a lot of birds, but not significantly more than I usually hear later in the morning or in the afternoon, and I didn't see very many at all. (Of course, that could have more to do with the whole leaves-on-the-trees thing.) So it was an interesting experiment, but since I've been tired all day today as a result, I don't think I'll be taking part in dawn woods excursions very often. :P

I'll try for another woods-walk tomorrow -- I need more practice with the camera before the next big trip!

West Rock ho! (Part 2: Birds and flowers and such)

Yesterday, Paul and I had an adventure at Lake Wintergreen in West Rock State Park, and I already posted about some of the creatures we saw there. Here's the second part of the account, filled with birds and plants and other fun things!

I almost never get to see Red-winged Blackbirds anymore, since the lakes at the Naugatuck State Forest where I usually hang out don't have much in the way of reeds or cattails or brush on the water's edge where these birds could make their nests. So I was pretty excited to be around them again, with the males calling and flashing their red shoulder patches in all their glory. Even Paul was getting into these bright displays (he usually isn't very interested in birds).

We also found a flock of Northern Rough-Winged Swallows, seven or eight birds, all careening and diving through the air, and sometimes zooming right by our heads. They were taking turns landing on the path, like the bird in this picture, and picking at something brown and apparently delicious there. And no, that isn't a trick of the camera -- their bodies really are that long and stretched-out. This is a new bird for me, and I don't have any experience with swallows at all really, so it was fun to be able to watch these guys at such a close range.

We found several cool wildflowers as well:

This is Fringed Polygala, a wacky-weird flower that I only learned last year, and with such a bizarre shape, I'm a little surprised that I never noticed it before then. The plant in this picture has two flowers, but you can see the shape of a single flower better in this next picture:

I can't help thinking how much this flower looks like a whiskered face with big ears. :)

This is Hairy Solomon's Seal, with its green/yellow flowers dangling below its stem and just starting to open. You can see the tiny hairs on the underside of these leaves in the zoomed-in picture, and this helps distinguish this species from other Solomon's Seal plants that grow in Connecticut.

The Lowbush Blueberry plants are just starting to open their flowers, in preparation for a delicious summer yield. Yum, yum, yum. I actually haven't noticed many wild blueberry bushes in the Naugatuck State Forest yet, and hopefully I won't miss out on this treat by hanging out there this year.

I was excited to find Pink Lady's Slippers sending up their graceful buds. I love these plants -- I just think it's so cool that we have orchids growing wild around us (this lady's slipper is just one among many different species), and it feels like a treat to find them. Hopefully I'll stumble across some of these flowers open before the season is finished, but the buds are beautiful in their own right.

Here's one last picture, a pretty Orange Sulphur butterfly that flew across our path:

All in all, it was a wonderful trip, and I'm glad we got to visit West Rock again. :)