On Friday afternoon, I went to check out the O.D. von Engeln Preserve. This Nature Conservancy property has some interesting glacial formations and a variety of habitats, including a bog, which as I understand it is pretty unusual for this area. I don't get many chances to explore bogs, and I very much enjoyed the path through this part of the preserve:
The bog was filled with big and beautiful flowers from the Purple Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia purpurea). How does one plant get to eat bugs and have such amazing blooms?
These are some weird flower structures -- fitting, I suppose, for a plant as strange as a pitcher plant:
In another part of the preserve, this small Garter Snake was basking in a sunny patch on the forest floor:
I'm hoping to return to this place in the coming months to see what other interesting flowers might show up. Bogs are fun!
This morning, Paul and I went for a walk at the Roy H. Park Preserve, where we met this creature on the path:
A little Common Snapping Turtle! It's got the long tail and spiked shell of a snapper, but it's just a baby monster as yet:
Hello, little monster, you are very cute:
This morning's walk also featured a singing Blackburnian Warbler and Indigo Bunting (both too far away for my camera), and a small American Toad crossing the path:
I love that it's the time of year when reptiles and amphibians are common, and new wildflowers are appearing seemingly all the time. Summer is on its way!
Well! I've been out and about in the past month and a half, and also working hard, and in that time: Fall happened! The weather report is calling for snow this weekend (!), so this seems like the best and last time to share the pictures of fall in Central New York that have been gathering on my computer since my last post. I missed this season deeply during my year in Northern California, so I tried to absorb as much fall as I could in recent weeks. Here are some sights from all of fall!
Way back on October 11, I was at the Roy H. Park Preserve just as the fall foliage was really getting going. I love seeing the trees make these waves of color:
A pair of White Cabbage Butterflies were feeding at New England Aster blossoms (Aster novae-angliae) while also making the next generation of butterflies. Actually, I guess just the one butterfly was feeding while the other was along for the ride. This whole process looks rather ungainly, but I guess it works:
All sorts of interesting fungi were sprouting up in the damp woods. This one log was home to at least three types of fungi, all with such different shapes and textures:
And this strange fungus looked like it was bubbling out of its tree's trunk:
A lovely little Garter Snake sat on the sunny forest floor near the path, waiting for the humans to move on:
A few days later, on October 14, I was back at another part of the Park Preserve, again marveling at the colors on the trees. Yes, we do fall pretty well here. I'll take it!
This was apparently a good week for snakes, because I nearly stepped on a Northern Water Snake who was basking on the path and looking way too much like a scraggly root:
The snake stayed motionless while we walked around it -- it was a chilly morning after all -- and I got to peek at its face through the grass:
In the woods, bright Canada Mayflower berries looked like little clusters of Christmas ornaments:
An almost-as-red dragonfly (one of the late-flying Meadowhawk species, I think) perched nearby, lacy wings against a lacy fallen leaf:
I'm always impressed that some insects are able to survive into the fall, past frosts and increasing cold. Several big grasshoppers were active in the marshy fields, and this one paused long enough on the boardwalk to have its picture taken:
On October 29, I got to walk in Sapsucker Woods, and the place was wonderful as always. The trees in some parts of these woods were bare by this point:
But other areas of the woods were still full and golden:
Witch Hazel blossoms floated over the path. How cool to see yellow leaves and yellow blossoms in the same day:
The view at the big pond was so still and beautiful:
A few Painted Turtles were out sunning, including this fellow with his impressively long claws:
And then, all of a sudden, it was late fall. On November 8, I was back at the Park Preserve, and the place was wholly different:
I have to say, for all the amazing riot of color in early-to-mid fall, I think I might love the muted colors of late fall around here even more... the floating yellows especially (are those birches?) but also the rusted browns and hazy grays and dark conifer greens. Ah, love:
The fields were filled with goldenrods gone to seed, here backlit for extra drama:
Even at this late date, a showy Meadowhawk dragonfly was still cruising around:
I happened to take a picture of almost the same scene at the Park Preserve nearly a month apart, and I love how these sights are both the same and totally different. Here's October 14:
Two weekends ago, on September 24, Paul and I went for a morning walk in Cornell's Sapsucker Woods. I'm starting to really love this place, and this visit held some particularly special moments. First, we finally found the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture that's eluded us on previous visits; this stonework cairn is tucked into the forest alongside a path, and it's lovely and subtle and such a fitting feature in these quiet woods:
A juvenile Yellow-bellied Sapsucker blended into the shaded trunk where it was foraging; a sapsucker in Sapsucker Woods, how appropriate!
Green Frogs peered up at us from a small green-covered pond:
And one frog posed nicely on a dark log:
At one point, we rounded a bend in the path to see big dark shapes up ahead:
We'd wandered into a Wild Turkey parlor, and these birds were understandably wary about our appearance:
But we stayed where we were -- some distance from the birds, although not really very far away -- and after a minute or so, the turkeys started preening. One turkey even laid down right in the middle of the path to preen, settling into a sunbeam:
These turkeys certainly knew we were there -- the front turkey kept an especially close watch on us -- but they seemed willing to share their space with us. Here's a video of these turkeys preening (pardon the noise of an airplane flying overhead):
Eventually, we decided to continue on our way; and as we came closer to them, the turkeys just calmly stood up and ambled off into the woods. Through the whole encounter, I kept thinking how extraordinarily polite these birds were. Thank you, wonderful big creatures, for letting us be with you in your woods for a little while:
So that was awesome. A little further down the path, a flock of hundreds of Common Grackles worked through the forest around us. And past the grackles, I found Beechdrops (Epifagus virginiana) emerging from the forest floor:
I didn't even know that this plant existed before I saw it. Beechdrops, it turns out, is one of those weird types of leafless plants that gets its nutrients by parasitizing another plant (in this case, American Beech trees). These small flowers on plain branching stems are actually quite lovely up close:
At the end of our walk, a Painted Turtle basked in a sunny pond:
And colorful sprays of goldenrod and aster -- so many colors! -- decorated the path back to the parking lot:
And speaking of colors, in the two weeks since I took these pictures, the landscape here has almost entirely changed. Fall has arrived, and it's wonderful. Hooray for seasons, and woods, and big polite birds.
Up until this past Saturday, it had been probably over a year since I last saw wild turtles. We never saw the one species of turtle in northwestern California while we were living there, and despite many walks around ponds, wetlands, and streams since moving to New York in July, there's still been a surprising lack of turtle sightings. But on Saturday morning, I visited the Cornell Plantations Arboretum, and apparently the ponds here are where all the turtles live.
Some children and their families were there tossing what looked like cereal into the water, and dozens of turtles were eagerly snatching up the food right along with the fish. There were lots of Painted Turtles, and, crazily enough, two huge Common Snapping Turtles right in the middle of it all:
I've never seen snapping turtles acting so much like fish, or like other turtles for that matter. What are these monsters doing casually swimming around in the light instead of lurking in some corner?
Easy food is a powerful motivator I guess. In any case, I loved getting to see these creatures' algae-covered faces:
Yikes, what a wonderful monster:
The Painted Turtles were also lovely, of course, with their beautifully patterned shells:
While the turtles fed in one area of the pond, big tadpoles in another part of the pond kept swimming up to the surface (to grab a morsel of something while the pond's predators were otherwise engaged?) then diving immediately back down into murky water. Those tadpoles were too quick for my camera, but some young Bullfrogs perched on waterlily pads were easier (and very handsome) subjects:
I was sure I'd find turtles sooner or later, but I'm glad I got to see such an impressive group before summer starts to wind down!
In a continuing effort to squeeze out some last drops of Northern California while we're still in the area, Paul and I drove about an hour eastward on Sunday morning, up into the nearest mountains (~4,000 ft or so). Despite a lack of maps and marked trails, we were able to explore a bit of the Horse Mountain Botanical area, and we really liked what we saw. We had sunny skies, pointy conifers, and snow-capped Trinity Alps in the distance; what's not to like?
I find upper-elevation trees so weird and interesting. This small stretch of woods was nice and shaggy:
And a nearby ridge made a very pretty backdrop for our walk:
One especially cool thing about this place -- and a reason why it's protected as a botanical area -- is that the ground contains a large amount of serpentine (California's state rock), and so the plants here tend to be rare and specialized for growing in these harsh soil conditions. (Click here for some more information about plants' adaptations for serpentine soils.) Serpentine rocks are, incidentally, quite pretty, and I kept getting distracted by the green/black stones on the road where we were walking. Here's a lovely hunk of serpentine rock that found its way home with me (I wet it with water to make the colors clearer):
In any case, we saw a lot of flowers on Horse Mountain, and some of them were indeed serpentine specialists. Evergreen Everlasting (Antennaria suffrutescens), for example, only grows in serpentine soil, and this little clump was providing quite a banquet for the local pollinators:
I haven't been able to definitively identify this tiny hairstreak butterfly, but it and several of its jewel-like fellows were making good use of these flowers:
This Wedgeleaf Violet (Viola cuneata) apparently also likes serpentine soils, although it can be found in other environments as well (the pretty leaf in the background is a lily whose flowers were already spent):
And I'm not sure what species of wallflower this is, but its bright orange blooms really stood out, and this (I think) Pale Swallowtail (Papilio eurymedon) certainly seemed to like them:
Several small lizards dashed across our path at various points during our walk. We watched this pair of Common Sagebrush Lizards doing lizard-couple things in the shade; the male on the left was doing pushups to impress the female on the right, and she watched for a while, then she led him on a bit of a chase and out of sight:
While driving through the area, we even caught a glimpse of a Mountain Quail scurrying across the road -- it was surprisingly big, compared to a California Quail -- and we later heard another of these birds calling in the distance.
